Posted on February 18, 2011 by Simon Phipps
- Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net
Eben’s ideas on a zero-interaction home server (“FreedomBox”) to route internet traffic safely and effectively seem very interesting, but I wonder if there’s not the dimension of personal data hosting/VRM being overlooked in his thinking?
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Also:
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Freedom In A Box
Posted on February 17, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Despite all the rhetoric from Microsoft’s evangelists, they just can’t get over their hatred and fear of software freedom. And it’s not just about the GPL as some assert – this sweeping rule ensures they probably can’t even have software under some of Microsoft’s own OSI-approved licenses. Looking forward to the spin explaining why this is all OK.
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The Document Foundation’s leaders would still like it to be incorporated in Germany, but the rules there require a minimum of €50,000 as a nest-egg. So they’ve launched an appeal to get donations. Five weeks; the clock is running…
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Rings true to me.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 16, 2011 by Simon Phipps
The Eclipse Foundation is home to a family of projects related to enterprise software development. Its Executive Director Mike Milinkovic has very kindly supplied the data for an Open-By-Rule evaluation. In his submission Mike actually scored the first point higher and I reduced his +1 for “open” down to zero because the Board is controlled by paid seats, but otherwise I agree with his evaluation, giving an overall score of +8 on the -10 to +10 scale. Eclipse definitely qualifies as “open-by-rule” according to the benchmark.
| Rule |
Data |
Evaluation |
Score |
| Open, Meritocratic Oligarchy |
Directors
Architecture Council
Planning Council |
The Board of Directors is a mix of “Strategic Members” and elected members representing the community. There are a total of six elected representatives on a board of eighteen. There are no seats reserved for any company. Each Strategic Member company must re-commit both its dollar and headcount (8 FTE) commitments to Eclipse on an annual basis. Score 0 for pay-to-play-controlled Board that does no harm to the overall community.
(Mike notes: “Although some may question the notion that there is a meritocracy involved where there Board has many corporate members who are there by virtue of their financial and resource commitment to the community, in practice this works extremely well. What we have ended up with is a mix of large and small companies who are strategically committed to the success of the community. This commitment is tangible and re-evaluated annually.” )
The Architecture and Planning Councils share a similar mix, but the vast majority of members are there by virtue of their activity or leadership of a Project Management Committee. In the case of the Architecture Council, the vast majority of members have been elected by the existing members based on clearly meritocratic basis. Score +1 for meritocratic, +1 for oligarchy, in the technical leadership. |
+2 |
| Modern license |
Eclipse Public License v1.0 |
The EPL is an OSI-approved license with a well-written patent license clause very similar to that of the ASL 2.0. The EPL is a “weak copyleft” license and is particularly well suited as a license for a shared platform for an ecosystem that includes both open source and commercial adopters. |
+1 |
| Copyright accumulation |
There are no copyright assignments at Eclipse at all. |
There are no copyright assignments at Eclipse at all. Every single contributor, no matter how large or small, makes their contributions under the EPL. We have complete symmetry between inbound and outbound licensing. |
+1 |
| Trademark policy |
Please see the logo guidelines |
The trademarks policy keeps the Eclipse name, and the name of all of its projects and their namespaces in trust for the entire Eclipse community. No trademark using entity has any more rights than another. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit entity which has no commercial motive for the control or exploitation of any of its trademarks.
(Mike adds: “Caveat: Prior to the creation of the Eclipse Foundation as an independent entity, IBM followed a laissez faire policy towards the Eclipse trademarks and the marks of the various projects inside the Eclipse community. As a result, there are uses of “Eclipse” and other marks which have been grandfathered which would otherwise be in violation of our trademark.”) |
+1 |
| Roadmap |
Roadmap
Indigo Plan
Helios Plan |
The Eclipse Foundation publishes an annual roadmap each year which pulls in the release plans of the vast majority of its projects.Each year the Eclipse community releases an annual release train combining the work of a significant subset of the Eclipse community’s projects. All of the requirements, planning and execution of the release train is done is done in an open and transparent manner. |
+1 |
| Multiple co-developers |
Commits
Active committers
Total committers |
Across the Eclipse community there is a very diverse collection of companies and individuals involved in projects.They also transparently publish all sorts of metrics regarding diversity and activity. |
+1 |
| Forking feasible |
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There are no licensing or copyright assignment barriers to forking. However, the continuing predominance of IBM committers on the Eclipse platform itself means that forking that particular piece of the Eclipse community would be difficult. |
0 |
| Transparency |
Minutes site (includes minutes for Board, Council and Membership meetings) |
Eclipse publishes minutes of all of its meetings.The Board operates under a mix of Chatham House rules and a requirement that not detailed personnel or financial information be published. All other minutes are made available. |
+1 |
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Summary (scale -10 to +10) |
+8 |
I’m grateful to Mike for the work he’s contributed here – thanks! If you’d like to submit the data to help me test the benchmark on your community, please do.
Filed under: Governance, Links, Open Source | Tagged: Eclipse, Open-By-Rule | 14 Comments »
Posted on February 15, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Excellent and honest account from Cory of his experiment in self-publishing. From reading this it’s clear that there is still a roll for publishing agents – notably in securing volume pricing for physical books and in managing promotion. All the same, it’s early days.
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This would have been unthinkable as recently as a decade earlier.
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One point to make about this; MPEG-LA will undoubtedly assert this initiative is encumbered too and attempt to create a FUD-y patent pool arround it.
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Probably only a temporary setback for the music industry intermediaries though. Their greed overwhelms any attempt to see through the situation and understand there’s a change in society going on rather than malefactors at work, and they will be sure to continue to persecute potential customers until copyright law is changed.
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About time too. The current “legal cartel” arrangement in Europe is a severe inhibitor to the emergence of the next stage of the connected society as it means people will only risk being mobile and connected when in their own area. I’ll believe it when I see it though, the vested interests here are very powerful and pay many lobbyists.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ New Models
Posted on February 13, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Don’t for a second underestimate the importance of document formats – the way your files are stored by the program you use – in locking you in to a vendor ecosystem. It sounds dull – not just mundane, the esoterica of the mundane – but it’s a crucial driver in the dominance of major vendors.
DFD has been running for a few year. It provides a day to raise the profile of document formats and demand that our governments, schools, religious bodies, employers and more all use open formats. When they do, we’re all free to engage with them using the computers and software of our choice rather than theirs.
Without document freedom phrases like “if you don’t use Microsoft Word you can’t apply” negate our choices and incrementally remove our freedoms. So celebrate Document Freedom Day 2011 this year, it’s on March 30th and you can join in easily, maybe by choosing to challenge a demand to use a particular computer program that day (“I’d love to read your document but I don’t have the program you used to make it”). [Extended version on ComputerWorldUK]
Also:
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Document Freedom Day | Comments Off on ☞ Getting Document Freedom
Posted on February 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Great explanation from Mark Wielaard of how the effectiveness of the OpenJDK community in dealing with the Double security problem was degraded by poor communication.
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More of Dave Neary’s wisdom, this time on the key open-by-rule metric of community roadmaps.
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Excellent analysis from Stephen O’Grady of why Java is nowhere near as dead as some other analysts would like you to believe – “rumours of my death are much exaggerated”. This was the well-received talk Stephen gave at FOSDEM.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Java’s Future
Posted on February 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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The Obama administration wants Big Media to have even more repressive control on America’s citizens. Looks like Obama doesn’t need the people that got him elected any more.
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Seems companies abusing the DMCA to limit free speech are easily identifiable by their fear of transparency. Look at this disgusting new ploy aimed at keeping their bullying secret.
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The OSI Board has welcomed the DoJ’s further investigation of the sale of patents by CPTN, as well as endorsed the comments made by the FSF on the matter.
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If you’re about to set out on your own and are looking for startup ideas, you should check here to see if it’s been done before…
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Dealing With Monopolists
Posted on February 8, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Give this
UK-based online music site a try (assuming you can – the usual music industry geographic restriction nonsense applies). It lets you listen to whatever you want just like Spotify does, but without the ads, subscriptions and restrictions. The music is cheap too and there are regular special offers – try entering code “20X20” to get all tracks for 20p each for the next 20 hours, for example.
Note: This code gives me a music credit if you sign up directly from it, but I’d recommend the site even if it didn’t 🙂
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Here’s a great download for your e-reader if it can handle PDFs – Lord of the Rings retold from the perspective of the oppressed orcs.
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You’ll need to be familiar with his books (like “The Tipping Point”) but if you are chances are that you’ll like this.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Fun For A Change
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This paper asserts what I have heard from many directions – that government procurement remains closed to open source, regardless of the official political policy. It’s certainly that way in the UK; I’d welcome insight into the steps the current government plans to fix that.
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The FSF and OSI collaboration to challenge the CPTN acquisition of Novell’s patent portfolio continues. I agree completely with this FSF statement.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 4, 2011 by Simon Phipps
Also:
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The very best thing to do is write back and say “you are mistaken, we only use open source software and there is no need for any audit”. But if you can’t honestly say that, this looks like the best advice.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ DoJ Agrees With OSI and FSF
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