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.
Don’t Call It Relicensing!
Using open source elsewhere is not relicensing, it’s overlaying a second license.
So you’re considering taking some open source code under a minimal, non-reciprocal OSI-approved license and putting it under a different open source license, hopefully in combination with your original code (or another form of larger project).
Don’t call this “relicensing” – it is not! The original license will continue to apply and you remain responsible for complying with its requirements. Only the copyright holder can change the license. You’re not relicensing – instead you are using the rights the license has given you and applying an additional license to the combination of the earlier work and your work.
Continue readingAn End To API Gaslighting?
The Supreme Court decision in Oracle vs Google ends a decade-long nightmare for open source developers.
The decision of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to reverse the erroneous conclusion of the US Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) that Google’s use of the Java SE API in Android was a copyright infringement comes as a great relief to open source programmers everywhere. Software developers have always assumed that merely including a function prototype in their code does not require copyright permission as it’s just a fact about the implementation.
Continue readingSupporting 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.
Continue readingThe Week In Review: OSPOs
A Rights Ratchet Score Card
A draft scorecard for determining if a software project is open as bait for a business pivot or genuinely keeping your freedoms protected.
The seven signs a project is following the rights-ratchet route to riches and the framework for going beyond licensing can be augmented by some straightforward indicators of an issue. None of these alone is necessarily a cause for concern, but the more clicks, the more risks. Here’s a rough-and-ready first draft of a scorecard to check whether your software supplier considers you a community peer and will respect and protect your essential freedoms, or visualises you more like one of those pods in The Matrix. Just count the clicks; the more clicks, the higher the risk this is a rights-ratchet that will end up closed.
Continue readingWhat Did Sun’s OSPO Do?
Started in 1999 and established as an official corporate function in 2005, Sun’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) was among the first in the industry and maybe the first to use the name.
As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, corporations are the vehicle for the collective expression of many individuals. However, to the outside world they are a monolith, and are expected to be consistent as well as predictable in their actions. With the many varied, implicit expectations and explicit obligations that different open source projects have, transforming a company’s reputation into that of a good actor in open source is a complex task. It’s also a necessary one if you expect other actors to invest their time and work in your project, or to give you influence in steering a project together.
Continue readingThe 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:
Continue readingThe Week In Review: Standards
Accommodating Open Source In Standards Processes
Holders of zero-tolerance positions on both sides of the divide need to realise that accommodating open source productively inside standards bodies is both viable and happening now.
You’ll recall that open source and open standards are orthogonal concepts where even the words they share (like “open”) are defined differently. That doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive, nor that they are bad together – they can be cultivated well in the same garden. There is great value from accommodating the two orthogonal concepts so that neither is invalidated by non-mandatory elements of the other. When they combine, great value is unleashed.
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