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 readingTag Archives: OSPO
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 FAQ as Vital OSPO Tool
Using a community FAQ as a way to get internal disagreement addressed and external communities on board – the OpenJDK experience!
In this talk from FOSS Backstage 2021, Rich Sands and I discuss the way we used a (very large) FAQ to both align the disparate corporate functions inside Sun Microsystems and address the lack of trust in Sun by both the Free Java community and the wider open source community. What we did back then is still a highly appropriate tool for any OSPO that needs to stand in the divide between a controversial corporate position and an aggravated community.
Software Freedom For Business Value
Software freedom is important to as an idea, but it also creates all the value of open source for business and should be jealously guarded by OSPOs.
In talking about open source, I and others routinely use the expression “software freedom” to refer to the set of rights upon which the open source phenomenon is based. It arises as a synonym for “free software”, an unfortunately ambiguous term that leads people hearing it for the first time to conclude all the primary attributes of open source software relate to money — price, cost-of-ownership, license fee and so on.
“Software freedom” puts the focus in the right place — on the essential liberties required to benefit from the software. One problem with this alternative term is we are becoming accustomed to hearing discussions of “freedom” be limited to activist or political contexts, and consequently regard the term “software freedom” with caution. But a focus on software freedom isn’t just for the revolutionaries.
Continue readingPermission Beyond Licensing
Is that single-company-controlled project actually open source in the sense of delivering software freedoms to you or just about delivering prospective customers to its host company? Here are 7 tests.
I frequently sum up the nature of open source licensing as granting permission in advance to developers or users to use, improve and share the software for any purpose. But the “Permission In Advance” lens has uses beyond just the rights to copyrights and patents granted in an OSI-approved license.
In my consulting engagements, I use a “thinking tool” to help clients work through their proposals for new open source community activities. Evaluating a project’s licensing, patent, and community management strategy — both to join it and to host it — should begin with the question: “How confident are community members that they have permission in advance to do whatever they need to succeed?” The more reasons for confidence, the larger the community.
Here are some of the questions community members will be asking, perhaps silently, about single-company open source projects and their own agency as a member of the community:
Continue readingOSPOs As Community Advocates
Is your Open Source Program Office just part of your corporate defences, or is it the community’s advocate inside your company as well?
As we considered before, corporations are not a person, but are rather a vehicle for the collective expression of the vision of many individuals, showing the outworking of the processes and systems they devise to embody their vision. So the work of an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) needs to address social change within the company and address community needs outside as well as compliance or other corporate self-protection.
Continue readingCorporate Maturity As Stochastic Outcome
Corporate open source maturity may be better evaluated by considering the actions of individuals and small groups statistically rather than evaluating the stated corporate strategy
It’s easy to forget that corporations (and indeed large non-profits) are not a person, but are rather a vehicle for the collective expression of the vision of many individuals, as well as the outworking of the processes and systems they devise to embody their vision. Things happen not because a faceless corporation somehow chooses to act in a certain way from a point in time, but because of the persuasive decisions of actual people, acting within their belief systems and directing the work of others.
Every good – and bad – decision ultimately goes back to an individual somewhere, and corporate effects are in many ways emergent. So fitting a maturity model to a corporation may not be the best way to predict its future outcomes. That is a trailing indicator driven by the behaviours of the individuals within the company.
Continue readingCompliance Is Not Just For Copyleft
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
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