The following article was co-written with Michele Herman of JustTech
Open source software and open standards have many similarities but the legal frameworks under which each are created have real and important differences. Nonetheless there is an increasing desire to …
Are there political dimensions to open source software and hardware? Americans might be surprised to see such a question, given Washington’s almost complete indifference to the dramatic rise of these approaches to technology development. But that’s not the case in …
Of the fundamental structural questions that drive discussions within the open source community, two that continually spur fervent debate are (a) whether software code should be contributed under a Contributor License Agreement (“CLA”) or a Developer Certificate of Origin (“DCO”), …
There’s been a lot of activity in diverse parts of the standards and open source software development world of late. Here’s a selection of items you may have missed that I think might be of greatest interest.
When you incorporate open source (OS) code into larger programs, it is risky to assume that the official license for the project is the only license you need to comply with. This is true even if the only OS code …
Not all free and open source (OS) software licenses have been created to achieve the same goals, and failure to understand the differences can have dire consequences. Some OS licenses are business-friendly in that they allow the code to be …
Everybody uses open source software (OSS) today. Millions of people contribute to the code itself. Indeed, a substantial percentage of the users and creators of OSS today are young enough to have never known a world that didn't rely on OSS. In other words, it's very easy to take this remarkable product of open collaboration for granted.
Not long ago, the Linux community celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Linus Torvalds’ famous Internet post, and thus its birth. While Linux was not the first open source project (Richard Stallman announced his GNU Project eight years before), it soon became the poster child of a new way of collaborative development that changed not only how technology is created, but many other aspects of the world as well. Today, most critical software platforms and architectures are open source, and virtually all proprietary software is riddled with free and open source software (FOSS) as well. So, what could go wrong? Well, a lot, actually, unless we pause to think about where the potholes may emerge in the future, and how we can successfully navigate our way around them. That’s what I plan to do in a series of articles to which this is the introduction.
Almost nothing inspires a spirited discussion among the open source faithful as much as introducing a new open source license, or a major change in an existing license’s terms. In the case of version 3 of the GPL, the update process took years and involved dozens of lawyers in addition to community members. So, it’s no surprise that the pot is already boiling over something called the “Commons Clause.” How energetically? Well, one blog entry posted yesterday was titled The Commons Clause Will Destroy Open Source. The spark that turned up the heat was the announcement the same day by RedisLabs that it was adopting the license language.
My, my, what a difference a decade makes. Or for some, maybe not.
Ten years ago, Microsoft was led by Steve Ballmer, who very much viewed open source as the barbarian at the software giant’s gates. The feeling was emphatically reciprocated by most in the free and open source (FOSS) community, which viewed Microsoft as a threat to the very existence of FOSS. And if Ballmer had been able to have his way back then, they would probably have been right.