Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Interview: Nelson Pratt, OSDL Marketing Director (Techworld)
Techworld has a strange interview with Nelson Pratt, the "marketing director" for OSDL. "We see Linux going further into the enterprise but one of the big inhibitors is licensing. We know from talking open source customers that licensing on a large scale is too labour-intensive. The typical open source licensing granting process was set up with the view of protecting developer/hacker."
(Log in to post comments)
Interview: Nelson Pratt, OSDL Marketing Director (Techworld) Posted Mar 11, 2005 16:20 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] What on earth was this? It's not April Fools day for another couple of weeks yet. And it wasn't any funny anyway.So, ok. The reporter at Techworld has a bad day, but why was this posted on LWN?
Why was it posted? Posted Mar 11, 2005 16:33 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I figured that, if "directors" at OSDL are hatching schemes for "fixing" Linux licensing, people might want to know about it...
Why was it posted? Posted Mar 11, 2005 16:54 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] Nelson is fond of telling people that Linus works for him. He's not one of the more clueful people there and will probably go away eventually.
Works for me too? Posted Mar 12, 2005 5:55 UTC (Sat) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Linux works for me, as for others. Linus works for his wife & kids, like the rest of us.
Doesn't work for me Posted Mar 14, 2005 14:23 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I think that Bruce refers to Linus Torvalds himself, creator of the Linux kernel and hacker extraordinaire. Mr Torvalds actually works for Nelson Pratt; or at least Mr Pratt is fond of saying so, since he is a director at ODSL. So it's not "Linux works for him" as you imply.
Why was it posted? Posted Mar 11, 2005 19:20 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] The interviewee use the word 'Linux' without specifying what he istalking about. Certainly the Linux kernel is GPL, the GNU userland and develland is GPL, KDE and GNOME are GPL, mozillaware are GPL (among others), etc.
Sure, GNU/Linux distributions usually come with softwares covered by various
Why was it posted? Posted Mar 12, 2005 0:54 UTC (Sat) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] You mean, Debian?
Extremely confused Posted Mar 11, 2005 16:20 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] The typical open source licensing granting process was set up with the view of protecting developer/hacker.... We hear that the burden of reviewing licences is an inhibitor for Linux yet in two years it will be in 25 per cent of all servers. This guy is in a high position at OSDL? 'Cause this sounds like businessmag speak here. Sure, the open source licensing granting process was set up with the view of protecting the deveoper/hacker, but also of protecting users of software. (The GPL, indeed, was written from a point of view that one should assume that users might be/become developers/hackers.) And, indeed, even if it wasn't designed to protect the users, in what way does it not now? And what's this burden of reviewing licences? IF you're a proprietary software company who wants to buid on the software, then, yeah... but how many potential users is this? (I won't even go into the old saw of comparing that cost to the cost of trying to build on a proprietary code base.) Open source licenses are really easy and straightforward if you aren't modifying the code; you almost don't have to think about them. Large scale, small scale, it's all the same; indeed, that's the neat thing about free software, is that licensing is trivial if you're a user, and you don't have to worry about what happens if you need to scale up later. The only way the costs of reviewing them would be more than the costs of licenses for proprietary software would be (a) you have people somewhere with a vested interest in making open source licenses seem expensive, and (b) you haven't bothered reviewing your proprietary EULA's to find out what you've left yourself open to by agreeing to them. This interview just adds to my bias that the term "marketing" means something somewhere between "propganda" and "dissembling." -Rob
Extremely confused Posted Mar 12, 2005 21:27 UTC (Sat) by aaron (subscriber, #282) [Link] This guy is in a high position at OSDL? 'Cause this sounds like businessmag speak here. This guy was the first of a pile of marketroids Stuart Cohen brought in when he took over. These folks looked pretty plush; I figure OSDL spent more on their salaries than on the dev staff. They replaced Wookie's old marketing team, who had actual open-source and technical backgrounds. Shortly after that, Stuart also laid off a tester, some devs and a sysadmin (me). Really, Stuart's an OK guy, but I wish the board would instruct him to take more interest in the tech side of the OSDL, and reach out to media other than the biz press. Not bitter since the severance paid for my first year of college,
Interview: Nelson Pratt, OSDL Marketing Director (Techworld) Posted Mar 11, 2005 16:53 UTC (Fri) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link] That is an extraordinarily bad interview.
I think that the concern that was meant to be expressed is the same one we all have: pointless license proliferation. Both the FSF & the OSI are actively discouraging new licences now : But there is plenty of widely used stuff under different licences.
Its impossible to tell if the incomprehensible wording comes from the OSDL guy or the journalist. I'm hoping against hope it was the journalist.
Bizarre Q&A... Posted Mar 11, 2005 17:01 UTC (Fri) by grund (guest, #830) [Link] From the article: There's not going to be a unified Netware or AIX -- software development is somewhat Balkanised, and the Linux development community would do well to address that, so they write once and have software run consistently across different hardware platforms.Ummmm, yeah, Has this guy actually run anything on different hardware platforms? Aside from all the other strange answers in the article, this one struck me the most. For all the differences in hardware platforms (instruction sets, endianess, etc) Linux provides a pretty good abstraction layer for application programmers. You will find no other operating system kernel that runs on everything. So to sit there and say *we* need to work getting things to run consistently, when he just spewed out bizzare ramblings about licenses only being designed to protect the developers (and sorry there bud, Microsoft uses licenses that protect the developer's interests, most OSI approved licenses protect the user's interests)... I know I'm preaching to the converted, but consider it a warm up for the letters I need to write to this guy's handlers/bosses/sponsors...
Strange indeed Posted Mar 11, 2005 22:47 UTC (Fri) by omez (guest, #6904) [Link] I got that woozy feeling I've come to associate with the Hedrick Semantic Distortion Field.
|
|
||||||||||||