License proliferation has been a topic for discussion for quite a while now in the FOSS community and many would like to see the Open Source Initiative (OSI) fix this problem for good. In a license proliferation report, the OSI lists three problems that people generally see with license proliferation:
Blogs
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Creating an Open Source Action Plan
I recently wrote about how open source software policies evolve. Yesterday I read another model about how open source software usage evolves in a company. Bernard Golden's O'Reilly Open Source in the Enterprise Report contains five pages on how to create an open source action plan and his first step is to decide if your company is early in their adoption of open source (90%), mainstream (10%) or an advanced user (<1%).
Early adopters are people still using open source software under the radar. Early adopters should focus on figuring out what they are using, setting up a govenrance process and learning community skills.
Building an Open Source Community
There are many books published that explain how to build communities, but not so many explaining how to build a developer community, and hardly any which focus on open source communities. Some might say that open source communities "just happen", and that they operate on intuition and unwritten social rules, but this logic overlooks the vast quantity of open source projects that fail.
Given the importance of the communities around open source software, it's essential to understand the hallmarks of successful open source communities when starting your own open source project. Creating an effective framework in which the community can operate often makes the difference between success and failure.
Given the importance of the communities around open source software, it's essential to understand the hallmarks of successful open source communities when starting your own open source project. Creating an effective framework in which the community can operate often makes the difference between success and failure.
BT joins FOSSBazaar
BT announced on the 24th July 2008 that it had joined FOSSBazaar as a strategic partner. And it was really great to see this announced as the engagement is something I’d been working on for a while with colleagues at BT. Obviously before we commit resource to such an activity there has to be sponsorship from the business, due diligence carried out and general consensus that it is a good thing to do. Now that this has been done we can scope in more detail how we will contribute, and following which the real work can start!
FOSS Name Calling
Almost everyone has their own names for licenses, even if they differ just a little. Does it matter if I call a particular open source license “Danger's Public License version 1.5,” “DPLv1.5,” or "MIT-sytle license, variant 7"? This is essentially a problem of taxonomy, and it makes a big difference in how you hunt for licenses.
Equally important, everyone has their own idea of which licenses they care about and don't care about. Some organizations cannot embrace certain licenses or families of licenses, while others merely want to ensure that the software they use or produce fits into a predefined library of vetted licenses. This is an issue of value judgments and legal interpretation. Licenses might be considered "Good" or "Bad", "Of Interest", "Awesome", or "Purple", depending on who you are and how you plan to use the software.
Equally important, everyone has their own idea of which licenses they care about and don't care about. Some organizations cannot embrace certain licenses or families of licenses, while others merely want to ensure that the software they use or produce fits into a predefined library of vetted licenses. This is an issue of value judgments and legal interpretation. Licenses might be considered "Good" or "Bad", "Of Interest", "Awesome", or "Purple", depending on who you are and how you plan to use the software.