Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week) [LWN.net]

Information Week looks at the Avalanche Technology Cooperative, an association of large companies attempting to do "private open source" development. "Avalanche has spent more than $350,000 in the past two years on legal fees with the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP to develop a software-licensing policy that would restrict use of the code to co-op members. The group also will indemnify its members against legal action from outsiders. 'We ensure the submitter is the owner of the code,' Avalanche CEO Jay Hansen says. Members pay a $30,000 annual fee that helps cover the legal costs."

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Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

Posted Sep 7, 2004 16:30 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Thoughts:

Free Software cooperation between business rivals is legal because everything is in the open. These cooperative schemes don't seem to have that protection.

They don't say how anybody new enters such a cooperative. Can a company just join and get access to years' worth of development, immediately? If not, perhaps coop membership will just decline over time, and eventually peter out. (If so, why not wait and pay less?) When a company drops out, do they still have free use of all the code they are already using? Is it possible for a project to be relicensed as Free Software, later, to get wider participation, or is all the code produced locked up forever?

We should be prepared for this project to fail, and to have Free Software tarred both for competing unfairly and for providing the practices that will be blamed for the failure.

They have no worries about illegal restraint of trade.

Posted Sep 7, 2004 16:54 UTC (Tue) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Note the companies named as co-op members:

Eight Minnesota companies, including retailer Best Buy Co., ....
[A]lso includes class-ring maker Jostens Inc. and bed maker Select Comfort Corp.
Cargill Inc. and Medtronic Inc. ... dropped out a year ago.

Those were all the names named in the article. None of them competes with another: We've got a big-box store, a class-ring maker, a mattress company, an agricultural keiretsu, and a medical-equipment maker. This is not a monopoly or a price-fixing conspiracy in any sense that the U.S. Code claims to prevent.

(Competitors can work on Free Software when it's peripheral to their core business (witness Apache). If they tried it with their crown jewels, though, they'd be cutting their own throats: competitors would take the code and run.)

Unfortunately, the whole thing seems to be based on more SCO FUD:

[Open Source] has ... raised legal issues about who owns the intellectual property that's flying around the Internet. SCO Group Inc. has sued AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler, and IBM for violating its Unix intellectual property through their use of the open-source Linux operating system.
The Avalanche group has tried to sidestep this issue by providing its members with legal protection....

Sounds like a law firm got a juicy sinecure.

Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

Posted Sep 7, 2004 19:00 UTC (Tue) by pglennon (guest, #649) [Link]

I don't see how this affects free software at all. none of the principals of free software are at play here. in essence, they are just creating a 3rd business entity and licensing technology from it.

It's just a slightly bigger cathedral. It's not anywhere near a bazaar.

-Patrick

Cliches

Posted Sep 7, 2004 19:05 UTC (Tue) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

The first cliche this made me think of was the old saw about those who don't understand Unix, and must therefore recreate it - badly.

Follow the money had a brief moment in the sun, but it quickly became apparent that the lion's share is going to the lawyers, and it dropped by the wayside.

By the time I reached the end of the article, it seemed likely my first impression was right after all: ... the cooperative is trying to gain the collaborative advantages of open-source development without discarding the structure of proprietary project. Open-source development projects can have completion dates continually slip, he says. ... "if four CIOs say, 'This needs to get done,' it will get done."

Of course, if four CIOs say that about a real open source project (that they're contributing to - gotta ante up if you want to be able to call), they can get much the same results. Heck, anyone can, if they're willing to do the work. This way they just get less potential contributors, and a big annual legal fee besides. Maybe they can more easily expense the latter...

Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

Posted Sep 8, 2004 8:45 UTC (Wed) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

Well i must say this only goes to reinforce my thoughts on Open Source
It will be defrauded en mass by companies around the world and unless we start to get heavy with them it aint gunna be nice .

The rules should state Develope on Open Source == Your output is Open source no if and or buts about it no questions no getouts no nothing OPEN == OPEN full stop .

Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

Posted Sep 8, 2004 14:01 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

`Defrauded'?

I don't think we can stop them writing their own code and keeping it private to their little clique. It's not as though they're taking Linux kernel code or GNU grep or something and using it in there: and even if they were, the individual actors involved are free to not distribute their modifications beyond the boundaries of their little clique: they just have no recourse in copyright law to stop their individual members from handing those mods out to all comers.

(They might try to stop it with a separate contract among their members: I'm not sure if that would be considered GPL violation, and certainly they could not use that weapon against third parties to whom the GPLed code was redistributed by one of their members, only against the member doing the redistributing. I seem to recall that there was a bit of a flap when Caldera tried to release a beta under similar terms: but the part of Red Hat that used to be Cygnus frequently enters into contracts with providers of cash when porting GCC that lead to changes staying out of the main GCC tree for an agreed period of time, and nobody calls that GPL violation. This is a murky area.)

The only objectionable thing is that this bunch call what they're doing `open source', which is wrong by any measure (what they describe is even less `open' than `open systems').

But we didn't sell it

Posted Sep 8, 2004 14:49 UTC (Wed) by doodaddy (guest, #10649) [Link]

I'm not the brightest when it comes to the subtlties of the GPL but it sounds like these guys have found a way to charge other companies for extensions to open source. After all, they don't charge for the code, but for membership in a "co-op." As the co-op grows to 20,000 companies, they are being charged for kernel upgrades that the rest of us can't get.

On the other hand, if they are building apps on top of Linux, like any other commercial entity, then whatever.