Thursday, 4 January 2007
OSI and General Attribution Provision
« All Hail the Elephant Build | Main | Marc Fleury's new blog on Blogspot »I've attempted to heat up the license-discuss list at OSI in order to see a bit more lively debate before advertising licenses are approved. Rick Moen has written a very detailed Linux Gazette article on some of the issues. Once minor nit:
By the way, I mean no disrespect towards Web 2.0 companies generally. In fact, Andrew C. Oliver of Buni.org has, to the great credit of himself and his firm, spoken eloquently against Socialtext et alii's GAP initiative, as clearly contrary to core notions of open source. (Oliver predicts that OSI will approve GAP or some similar mandatory-advertising proposal. I sincerely hope he is mistaken.)
While we haven't launched the firm yet, buni.org is merely an open source community, I'm not sure Bunisoft will be considered Web 2.0 in my mind. A key differentiator is that most of the R&D money of Web 2.0 companies goes into UI leaving you with that unsatisfactory Dorito feeling. Buni is about making groupware that doesn't suck. Not sucking means:
- Groupware that works on Linux...or whatever your OS may be (some limitations apply)
- Groupware that lets you achieve SARBOX compliance
- Groupware software that lets you reuse your existing infrastructure: database, LDAP (including Active Directory), etc
- Groupware that a mere mortal groups of mere mortals can install, maintain and configure
- Groupware that scales
- Open Source groupware
- A calendar with freebusy
- Email with NO PST FILES
No weird far-fetched VC-backed ASP model for us. Perhaps that is why it is easy for us to stand up for open source rather than try and expand its meaning to mean software that requires popups and force-fed branding (aka adware) to meet the definition.
Although I know Ken Coar, and Danese Cooper, I was curious who composes the OSI board. Fortunately, it was posted by Matthew Flaschen who also posted this very good summary of some of the issues. While I have considerable respect for Mr. Coar and Mrs. Cooper, as stated I do suspect that OSI will ultimately accommodate the Exhibit-Bers. However, sunlight is the best disinfectant, perhaps more participation from the open source community at large would be in order.
To me one of the most ironic things is that if Meldware were to use one of the "Exhibit B" licenses such as that used by a competitive offering (for our web client), and use the same screen real estate...you could not aggregate code from two pieces of software under the exact same license! We have no plans to do so, Meldware is offered under the LGPL license with liberal policies.
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