Is it possible to hack the patent system to make patents unusable in the tech industry, like copyleft hacked patent law?
The word “copyleft” arises from a clever hack by Richard Stallman who used the laws relating to copyright — a statutory device to incent creativity by granting limited monopolies to creators — to create a world where creators are incented to share instead of monopolise their work. Continue reading
Simon co-hosted this week’s episode of FLOSS Weekly, which explored the Linkerd and Conduit projects. Both are provide a service mesh for load balancing and micro-service discovery in cloud computing.
In these days of code that no single mind can grasp, it’s hard to see how software freedom is present when there’s no realistic community access to source code.
In the early days of Free Software, it was a safe assumption that anyone using a computer had coding skills of some sort — even if only for shell scripts. As a consequence, many advocates of Free Software, despite a strong focus on user freedoms, had a high tolerance for software that made source available under free terms without providing other access to the project, especially in the days when that meant tapes by mail. Continue reading
This article on the Open Education Consortium’s Year of Open site highlights his views on software freedom.
Choosing between licenses – even copyleft vs non-reciprocal – is less important than ensuring everyone has equal rights & responsibilities.
I’m often asked which open source licence is best for businesses who want to release a project as open source. Usually behind the question the issue is a desire for corporate control somewhere in the organisation. This tends to flow from a conviction the only way a business can succeed is by keeping some sort of copyright (or patent) control that creates an artificial scarcity. Continue reading
Open source ensures developers already have permission to innovate and don’t need to ask first.
If you want your code to be open source, it needs an OSI-approved copyright license. Code with no license to the copyright isn’t open source. But project success needs more than just an OSI-approved license — it needs “permission in advance” for every developer and deployer. Continue reading
The cost of compliance may not just be a copyleft issue now we understand how to work with the GPL.
Even before Christoph Hellwig (backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy) started his suit to enforce his copyright claims against VMWare, there was a great deal of fear of the GPL in particular and copyleft licensing in general among corporate lawyers, and hence among their executive clients. Continue reading
You’re entitled to your opinion but in open source licensing only the consensus of the community really matters.
In a recent conversation on the Apache Legal mailing list, a participant opined that “any license can be Open Source. OSI doesn’t ‘own’ the term.” He went on to explain “I could clone the Apache License and call it ‘Greg’s License’ and it would be an open source license.” Continue reading
Data protection laws are about controlling triangulation, not (just) direct privacy
At the end of May 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in Europe. It creates a whole set of new responsibilities that are causing concern for businesses across the EU. It has effects outside Europe as well, because it will control the way businesses located in Europe can share data across borders, both within their company and with other companies. Continue reading
You’ll recall Simon was re-elected to the OSI Board after a year’s absence to satisfy term limits. Following the resignation of the excellent Allison Randal to focus on her PhD, he has now been re-elected as OSI President by the Board. More details can be found in Allison’s article.
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