Blogs

During my last talk at FOSDEM 2008 research room on "open research issues toward a legal framework for open source software", I have got question about Freedom restriction induced by tools like Fossology.

Since Richard Stallman used copyright law as an instrument to grant some fundamental freedoms, leading to "copyleft", we all know that legal constraints can be useful and part of the open source success story.

Yesterday I moderated a panel at OSBC with three very sharp IT folks, Julien Lambert from Shimano, David Rossellat of EA and David Johnson from the LA Times. The topic was about the “Real Benefits of Open Source.” All three organizations are widely using open source but mostly throughout their infrastructure and only for a few applications. One interesting data point is that they each said that open source is now considered for every IT purchasing decision. They may choose a proprietary application if the fit is better but open source is considered every time. Towards the end of the panel we got into governance and licensing and IP compliance. Interestingly enough, most of the organizations had a developer driven governance model and it was self-policing. In two of the cases the IT managers were the ones educating the lawyers. Not sure if that’s a successful long term risk mitigation strategy?

The EU is sponsoring a new two year project called FLOSSInclude to explore the use of FOSS as a development tool. In particular, the aim of FLOSSInclude is to study what is needed to "increase the deployment, development and societal impact of FOSS in Africa, Asia and Latin America". The project starts with the premise that FOSS provides a number of benefits to developing countries, such as low cost, adaptability, and a free-of-charge high quality training environment.

"There's no support" is one of the common anti-open source software arguments. I could start by saying we support 350+ open source software projects and we aren't the only ones in the business. But the real reason I think people say there isn't any support for open source software is because the open source software support model is different than the proprietary model.

I advocate figuring out your open source strategy before you create an open source policy. 

I've helped a number of companies create open source software policies and I've discovered that companies need to know what their open source strategy is before they can effectively implement a policy.  If you are using open source software primarily to save money on licensing fees, you will have a different set of policies than if you were using open source software primarily to help create a non-competitive space to develop standards with your partners.