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 readingArchives
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:
Continue readingThe Week In Review: Standards
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Here’s the meat of the tweets & toots from the week ending January 30:
Continue reading2021 Week 4 – Tweetage on Open Source
All open source licenses are permissive. They give you permission in advance to use the software for any purpose, to improve the software any way you wish and to share the software with whoever you want. They are the opposite of proprietary licenses, which place restrictions on each of these freedoms. Any license with restrictions would not be considered OSD compliant.
All open source licenses include conditions. Some relate to attribution. Some relate to reciprocal licensing. None of them restrict how you can use, improve and share the software, although you must comply with the conditions in order to do so. Some people consider some conditions so onerous they rise to the level of restrictions, but the consensus of the community has been they are wrong.
Today’s licensing games are thus mainly about testing where the accumulated burden of conditions is effectively a restriction – “constructive restriction”. There’s certainly a line where that would become true – for example, where the conditions associated with deploying the software as a cloud service are so hard to comply with that the software is effectively unusable in that field of use.
The OSD doesn’t include much to help with this so it’s contentious every time and sometimes leads to sophistry. This is probably the area where the Open Source Initiative needs to do the most work to modernise the license approval process.
All open source licenses are permissive
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Simon built a short slideshow for InfoWorld with some of the highlights of the first 20 years of open source. Take a look here.
20th Anniversary Slideshow
This article on the Open Education Consortium’s Year of Open site highlights his views on software freedom.
Open Education Consortium
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.
Simon’s article explaining why the Facebook license combo used for React.js and much more is a problem was published by the Red Hat OpenSource.Com site today. Because our articles are supported by Patreon Patrons and not reliant on artificial scarcity to pay the bills, we were able to offer Red Hat the article in response to the one by Facebook’s outside counsel yesterday. A win for the patronage economy!
