Chris DiBona from Google suffered the slings and arrows of the OSS community when he rejected the AGPLv3 license for Google Code repository, citing license proliferation as one of hte reasons. Looking back, Chris challenged the wisdom of OSI years ago when he was on their board, still at the time fighting against yet another license.
An open source software license is specifically a copyright focused on types of use permitted for electronic media.
By introducing yet another license, it create more complexity to explain, understand, and enforce the use of software governed by these licenses.
The reality is that lack of clarity and confusing, or internally contradictory terms, makes the license potentially limited in worth, as the cost to actually enforce that license increases.
Blogs
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2008: The Risk Report - FOSS
2008: The Risk Report
The Research Group has developed tools that objectivelytrack and report on operational risk associated with software applications,operating systems and hardware.I have seen a number of "Most Risky" lists that seem to besubjective and crafted by nothing more than a few Google searches and apopularity contest.
Top 25 FOSS
Does FOSS have a right to succeed in an economic downturn?
You would think so, wouldn’t you. However, in the face of harsh economic pressures the most common reaction is that of retrenchment, people become more careful, more conservative and less adventurous. They stick to their knitting. So, as FOSS advocates we have to be prepared for a slog in overcoming people’s heightened resistance to change when all around seems precarious.
The benefits of free and open source software – speed, agility, transparency, free - will be attractive to entrepreneurial companies who can see a way forward and recognise that this a way they can reduce their cost to serve new markets. However other companies who are locked-in to their current supplier arrangements will have little immediate wriggle-room and may not be able to leave those arrangements without costly exit penalties.
The benefits of free and open source software – speed, agility, transparency, free - will be attractive to entrepreneurial companies who can see a way forward and recognise that this a way they can reduce their cost to serve new markets. However other companies who are locked-in to their current supplier arrangements will have little immediate wriggle-room and may not be able to leave those arrangements without costly exit penalties.
Collaborative Model to Validate FOSS Packages, Part 1
Working as an outside counsel, it has happened to me more than once that our firm has been asked to legally validate an open source /FOSS package that somebody else already asked us to validate.
While preparing for an open source training session destined to (corporate) lawyers in tech firms, I decided to cite one critic against open source development model: according to the critic the cost of FOSS management in companies is often overlooked and grows over time.
So, with these in mind, I realised that companies should actually co-operate in the validation effort. Instead of each company validating each component separately, this could be done together, only once. This method provides several advantages. To describe the most obvious ones:
Reflections on a Year of F/OSS Governance at BT
For a year now we've had a dedicated F/OSS governance team in place at BT: the "Open Source Operations Team". In naming the group we opted for "operations" over "governance", as we saw the role of the group as being to foster adoption and increase understanding, in addition to that which is generally associated with governance. Also, we were keen to ensure that we were not seen as simply the company's "open source police", and for some, unfortunately, governance translates to restriction and red tape.