Blogs

During last Collaboration summit of the Linux Foundation in San Francisco,  Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler made a very interesting talk about “Lessons learned from ath5k” at Software freedom law center. They explained how they had to solve a copyright and licensing issue between linux and openBSD development teams.

I first introduced the collaborative model to validate open source packages and the benefits this offers at a Fossbazaar blog, the Part 1. This Part 2 focuses on how the collaborative model can be implemented and how it has been implemented by Validos, a Finnish association formed for this purpose:

While attending SD West in Santa Clara last week, Black Duck Software conducted a random survey of 50 developers attending the conference. We’ve all heard about developers using more open source today than ever before, but Black Duck wanted to get some feedback straight from developers themselves, so we put together some questions, circulated through the conference and started gathering responses. Before I get into the results, I first want to thank on the behalf of Black Duck all of the developers who took time out of their days to participate. Now, let’s get to the top level findings:

As F/OSS advocates we can articulate the benefits and ethics of the community approach to software development with knowledge and enthusiasm. But when we do so to a financial person they don't hear ‘community’ and ‘continuous innovation’ and ‘this is the year for the desktop’. They hear ‘risk’, they hear ‘uncertainty of costs and support’ (indemnities, warranties), they think they hear passion beyond reason.

Let's put passion aside for a minute and consider things from the point of view of these bean counters. To a CFO or FD there are three main issues: