Blogs

My company has recently launched an Open Source Certification service and I wanted to discuss why we think it provides real benefits to our customers. The way we design this program allows the certification to be a watermark for organizations that have led or are leading Open Source projects both behind and beyond their firewall. Ultimately, this certification can be awarded to entities whose operations or business model fully integrates Open Source.

Awarding certifications to customers can be tricky. You can fall in the trap of dilution, which essentially amounts to diluting the value of your expertise and your trademark by granting certifications too easily. You can also miss the fine line by essentially forbidding your customers to certify at any level by treating them like experienced hackers or community leaders.

In addition to being a software development paradigm open source has impact on business and sociological aspects of work, too. In the research project Managing OSS As an Integrated Part of Business (OSSI) open source was studied from these three different perspectives:

• business
• sociology
• technology

The business perspective was examined further in terms of legal aspects, economics, business models, competitive strategy, and value networks.

The project lasted two years (2005-2007) and the final report can be found in FOSSBazaar. Project publications and other information are available at the project homepage http://www.coss.fi/en/ossi.

At the beginning of July this year, we will have had the GPLv3 for two years. At this stage, many of the changes which the GPLv3 brought with it are known, not only to those dealing with FLOSS licenses on a daily basis, but also across the industry as a whole. Quite a lot of the discussion focused on issues such as “Tivo-isation” and the new patent clause – this is obvious from the commentary (and the comment frequency analyser) at http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-4.html as well as from the number of blogs and articles which focused on this issue over the last two years. There is, however, another issue which has been somewhat drowned out by the patent and DRM discussions – that of outsourcing arrangements under the various versions of the GPL.

Overview

Oracle's Buying Sun: What This Means to Open Source

I visited Seoul last week to represent OSI at an open source conference and to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Korea Software Copyright Committee (SOCOP). SOCOP organized a conference with the title "Free Open Source Software License Insight Conference", and the international speakers included Brett Smith of the FSF, Brendan Scott of Open Source Law, Michael Coté of RedMonk and myself. From the questions we received, it seems that there is a lot of interest in legal questions related to open source. There were a number of folks from hardware companies that asked specific questions what they could do and couldn't do (e.g. related to including sources for GPL code and properly giving credit for BSD code).