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Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)Posted Sep 7, 2004 16:30 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week) 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.
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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., .... 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.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
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