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.
Archives
The 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.
FLOSS Weekly 448: Hiawatha Web Server
Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 448, featuring the Hiawatha web server and associated projects.
FLOSS Weekly 442: Hyperledger
Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 442, where Brian Behlendorf explained the Hyperledger Project of which he is Executive Director. An excellent show, with many interesting branching-off points.
Hyperledger is a project to maintain a platform for distributed ledger projects and the toolkits and apps that support and use them. It’s intended for building private systems where everyone participating can be identified, so does not have an associated proof-of-work token or the “cryptocurrency” aura that goes with it.
It may be the tool that finally re-decentralises the Internet. By taking away the shiny gold, people can finally see the power of a distributed ledger whose authority is established by consensus rather than heirarchy. The book Simon mentions, “The Mystery of Capital” by Hernando de Soto, is available from Amazon UK and Amazon US.
FLOSS Weekly 432: FreeNAS
Simon was co-host of the lively interview with the FreeNAS project last week on FLOSS Weekly 432.
FLOSS Weekly 426: SIMP
Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 426, interviewing the SIMP compliance project for Linux and chatting about the “curing complexity” business model.
FLOSS Weekly on CouchDB
Simon joined Randal Schwartz to interview the lead developers of document database CouchDB on FLOSS Weekly 378.
hledger on FLOSS Weekly
Simon is one of the hosts interviewing the hledger project this week on FLOSS Weekly 375.
Bitcore 2.0
Simon co-hosted the FLOSS Weekly interview with BitCore, a node.js interface for bitcoin and its blockchain.
SFSCon 2013 Video
We delivered a workshop on defences against software patents at SFSCon 2013 in Bolzano, with travel sponsored by Open Invention Network. Here’s the video summarising the event
If you’d like to attend a similar seminar, let us know.
