Author Archives: meshedltd

Rights Ratchet Talk

Simon delivered a talk for the new Tidelift conference “Upstream”. In it he drew together the threads of several earlier posts about the rights ratchet model (“bait & switch meets boiling frogs”) using the history of the now-defunct Sugar CRM open source project as an initial case study and then examining the various ratchets that remove rights from open source project participants, ways to detect that a project is actually a rights ratchet and steps to mitigate the consequences including promoting permission in advance.

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Supporting AlmaLinux

We are pleased to be supporting the AlmaLinux OS Foundation as it starts its work as steward of the community around the new AlmaLinux distribution. Meshed’s founder Simon Phipps is joining the newly-incorporated non-profit as a director. In this role he will be building on his experience with many other open source Foundations to ensure that the governance is fair, stable, independent and transparent while also serving the needs of the AlmaLinux user community.

With the unexpected switch of CentOS to become an experimental upstream of RHEL, it was inevitable that candidates would emerge to replace it in its role of an unaffiliated downstream binary-compatible distribution of RHEL. The existence of a reliable downstream distribution is good for everyone, offering a low-friction on-ramp for newcomers and a long-term home for those capable of self-support. It builds the market so that commercial players also benefit from the ever-growing user base in a classic adoption-led model.

So it’s good that the need is being met by a distro anchored in an independent Foundation. AlmaLinux aims to leverage the existing build processes of a contributor company, CloudLinux, to produce a reliable, stable, binary-compatible distribution within the context of a community-administered non-profit Foundation. This US 501(c)(6) will hold all the trademarks, keys and other assets of AlmaLinux on behalf of the community. We’re pleased to be able to help make the initiative succeed. Congratulations on the first release!

FLOSS Weekly 622: Keith Packard

Simon joined Doc Searls to host episode 622 of FLOSS Weekly featuring Keith Packard, one of the key figures of the open source software movement. They talked about Keith’s involvement in the X System and Freedesktop.org and strayed into related topics including the many projects Keith has helped and his interest in rocketry!

One significant discussion considered the thread joining the fork of XFree86, the recent vote to change the board of Nominet in the UK and the controversy over the reinstatement of Richard M Stallman to the board of the Free Software Foundation this week. Each represents a significant entity to the open movement which has leadership that was established as a “club” between activists and failed to progress into a well-governed organisation representing and controlled by the community.

Our focus this week has been the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). While at Sun Microsystems, Simon led their OSPO and this week he got the team back together, including original founder Danese Cooper, to write about what they all did during the decade the Sun Open Source Program Office existed. This was a very popular article and it’s been read thousands of times this week. There’s scope to zoom in on specific topics mentioned in this article – let us know which would interest you.

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The Week In Review: OSPOs

The theme this week at Meshed was standards and open source. A recent post explained how open source and open standards are essentially unrelated, almost contrasting concepts joined philosophically by some based on their application in some industries. Two posts this took look at the consequences of that reality. To summarise the contrast in this context:

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The Week In Review: Standards

FLOSS Weekly 616: Software Heritage

Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 616 this week and along with Doc Searls interviewed Roberto di Cosmo from (among other things) the Software Heritage project, which has the goal of archiving all the world’s software source code. The discussion was as wide-ranging as you’d expect, covering both the idea of software as a cultural artefact and the specifics of Software Heritage such as the unique IDs it gives every software version it archives so that software becomes citable in research. One particular topic was the grant programme that Sloan Foundation funds to get new connectors for Software Heritage written, which readers may want to consider.

FLOSS Weekly 531: Bareos

Bareos is not pronounced the same way as bareness and despite sounding like it is nothing to do with a guy called Barry. It’s a comprehensive and mature backup system forked from the Bacula project when it headed proprietary a few years back. Simon joined Randall Schwartz to interview one of its founders and find out where it was headed and just what sort of open source project it is.

 

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FLOSS Weekly 523: FluidKeys

Simon visited the studio this week to co-host FLOSS Weekly 523 which interviewed the developers behind the new FluidKeys project that simplifies team key sharing so secrets can be passed encrypted and e-mails can be easily managed. It uses OpenPGP so potentially enhances any OpenPGP tool. It was open core when we started the show but by the end they were convinced it should actually all be open source under AGPL!