Blogs

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CFP: The Business of Open Source, Australia, January 2011

tbm's picture

I'm organizing a one-day miniconf as part of linux.conf.au (LCA) in Brisbane in January. If you'd like to present at this miniconf, please check out the CFP and get in contact with me.

Best practices in Open Source Governance at Open World Forum

tbm's picture

We'll have a one-day session about the governance of open source at Open World Forum to which everyone is invited. Open World Forum will take place in Paris on September 30th and October 1st. The governance session will be on the second day. The talks in the morning address topics related to the adoption of open source whereas the afternoon session focuses on governance issues and best practices. Open World Forum is free of charge to attend but you have to register in advance. I hope to see many of you in Paris!

Let a thousand flowers bloom...or be trampled under foot?

Andrew Grant's picture

It's 4 a.m., dark outside, the phone rings, your mobile goes off, you're in a convention hotel an ocean away from home in a different time zone. The server's fallen over, you need to bounce it remotely from a thousand miles away. You have to take the server down and bring it back up then restart the application. Good job the hotel has a connection and you have a signal.

Enterprise consolidation around a limited number of apps or one stack causes complications. It makes sense in terms of reducing support costs and ensuring that people are skilled up to the appropriate levels in the chosen software, yet this can stifle innovation. Instant access to new FOSS apps (without complex financial and procurement negotiations) stimulates new ideas, development opportunities and low/no cost prototyping for rapid application development.

Open Source Contributor Agreements: Some Examples

tbm's picture

The first part of this article explained the purpose and scope of Contributor Agreements in open source projects. This article presents an overview of some Contributor Agreements that are used in the community.

Contributor Agreements come in all shape and forms, ranging from full-fledged Contributor License Agreements (CLA) that have to be signed to informal consent to some set of rules. This article will take a look at a number of different agreements in order to show that community norms can vary widely.

Apache's Individual Contributor License Agreement

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) maintains two formal Contributor License Agreements (CLA), one for individual contributors and one for corporate contributions. The Individual CLA covers the following points:

Laws governing medical devices in the EU and their effect on free and open source software

cfarrell's picture

Changes to Member State implementation of Directive 93/42/EEC (3) of 14 June 1993 concerning Medical Devices as required by Directive 2007/47/EC

Background

Member States of the European Union recently implemented Directive 2007/47/EEC of September 5th 2007 concerning Medical Devices. This Directive amended Directive 93/42/EEC from June 14th 1993. Given that this Directive should now have become part of the national legislation of each EU Member State, it is a good time to take a look at how the provisions of the Directive could apply to open source software.