Legacy procurement rules that insist on indemnity from open source subscription suppliers are an unnecessary barrier to open source adoption.
Read about this on ComputerWorldUK
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Open Source | Tagged: Indemnity, Procurement | Comments Off on ☝ Procurement and Indemnity
I’ve reached São Paulo ready to speak at Campus Party tomorrow after Steve Wozniak in the evening. Here’s the abstract for the talk:
Lessons for copyright reform from open source software
The open source revolution started because hackers wanted the freedom to work together to make great software. But it’s grown up and become the key source of innovation in the software industry. Open source software has unique business value that’s simply not available from proprietary software, and allows ways of creating software that would be impossible if the copyright wasn’t freely licensed.
With Brazil reaching a turning point in copyright reform, what lessons can be drawn from the success of the open source movement? This talk will look at the history and social context of open source, identify some of the unique business benefits and suggests lessons on copyright and patents that can be applied to other sections of society.
All suggestions welcome for what I should actually say 🙂
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Brazil | Comments Off on ✈ Speaking at Campus Party Brasil on Saturday
One of the key control points in enterprise software is the provisioning or IDM software. It’s the point all the threads of directory, authentication, authorisation and provisioning come together and it’s the part that the proprietary vendors are least willing to surrender to that great deposer of control points, community-based open source software.
When ForgeRock (where I work) got started, some companies who had been promised an open source IDM by a vendor who then reneged on the promise asked if we’d join them building one. After about nine months collaborative work, the result was the OpenIDM project, for which ForgeRock announced support back in October.
That wasn’t the end of the process of course, and the pace is being maintained. I’m delighted to see that the emerging community is organising an OpenIDM Design Summit in two weeks in Oslo (January 26-27), both as a meeting point for the developers building it and as a meeting for the developers and businesses deploying it (mainly in Scandinavia at the moment, but the meeting will be in English). ForgeRock is providing the facilities and the agenda looks very interesting.
Filed under: ForgeRock, Identity, Open Source, Technology | Comments Off on Ⓕ OpenIDM Design Summit Announced
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board of Directors announced today that it has taken the unprecedented step of referring the proposed sale of Novell’s patents to the CPTN consortium (led by Microsoft and allegedly including EMC, Apple and Oracle – unlikely bedfellows) to the German competition authorities.
Continue reading over at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, OSI, Patents | Tagged: Microsoft, Novell | Comments Off on ☝ OSI Refers Novell Transaction To Competition Authorities
I keep seeing people contrasting “free/open source software” with “commercial software”. This is a really bad contrast, as in my experience almost all open source software is commercial. It’s just commercial in a different way.
Open source software is not “non-commercial” – rather, it is software where, when commercial activity takes place, revenues are generated from the delivery of value around the software rather than by controlling access to the software. This switch away from artificial scarcity liberates developers from many different places – in location, cultural and motivation dimensions – to synchronise overlapping interests and collaborate around an open source code “commons” to sustain the wealth-creating vehicle they jointly enjoy.
Filed under: Open Source | 4 Comments »
I pointed yesterday to an interesting comment about contributor agreements attached to a report about Michael Meeks speech a LPC. Another comment to the same article by Meeks himself casts light on another, much more serious issue for open source communities; bilateral agreements.
Read on at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Governance | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 2 Comments »
The conversation around LWN’s coverage of Michael Meeks’ talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference (sadly paywalled until now but available today and worth reading all the way through) provoked interesting comments. The subject of the discussion is LibreOffice and the code ownership issues which provoked the fork. But what caught my eye was a comment from Josh Berkus describing his consulting experiences.
Read on over at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Governance | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 1 Comment »
I’ve written previously about the freedom to leave, but there’s another value delivered by the liberties open source provides, one which it would even be worth paying extra to get. When your vendor changes direction, what do you do?
With open source software, there’s an option proprietary software can’t offer, one that it might even be worth paying extra to obtain. As long as it’s really open source and not compromised in some way, the community around the free-software commons can just “Rehost And Carry On“. Another company can step in to take the lead, or in the case that the project was already a truly diverse co-development community like PostgreSQL or an Apache community, there will already be a choice of alternatives available.
[Continue to read over at ComputerWorldUK…]
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: CWUK | Comments Off on ☝ Community Escrow
The last week has provided a number of interesting – and perhaps surprising – case studies in corporate engagement with open source. This Monday’s Link Post takes a look at Microsoft and Silverlight, Symbian, Oracle and Java and Canonical and GNOME, over at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Canonical, CWUK, GNOME, Java, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Symbian, Ubuntu | Comments Off on ☝ Corporate Open Source Case Studies
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The New York Times featured the activities of the GPL enforcement community recently. While there’s a part of me that’s pleased there are people doing this, I’m concerned that their actions – and those elsewhere, such as the Linux Foundation‘s compliance programme – are the focus of public understanding about open source software. Of the many attributes of software freedom that could move to front-of-mind, it strikes me that the minimal license compliance burdens for open source software are actually a comparative strength and having them presented as a feature applies a “frame” that serves only the detractors of software freedom.
License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the license involved in that case is an End User License Agreement (EULA), not a source license delivering extensive liberties. When we compare like-for-like, we discover open source software has no such issues. End-users do not need to have a license management server, do not need to hold audits, do not need to fear BSA raids. No wonder proprietary vendors want to divert our attention! Open source is so much easier!
Read on over at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: Open Source | Comments Off on ☝ License Compliance: Not An Open Source Problem
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