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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwareMark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwarePosted May 17, 2011 18:38 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by jake Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Okay,
And do other corporate entities do this sort of tech laypress sponsorship to their equivalent events? Google? Apple? Red Hat? I don't know I'm asking. For all I know this is common practice across the industry and if it is, well I think the entire industry probably needs to be more upfront about it...so readership can take sponsorship into account when applying their bias filters.
Again not to say that you are overly bias, if anything I think you punched Shuttleworth in the mouth a little with your choice of quotes. And because the article isn't overtly biased in his favor even though you were sponsored, it gives me some leeway in asking you about bias in the industry in a more general way with the hope that you'll give the question full consideration. Is it ethical for technical laypress to withhold travel sponsorship information from readership?
And it gives me the chance to challenge you personally with the next question. Do you consider yourself an active Ubuntu contributor? I'm trying to understand how laypress sponsorship jives with Jono's explanation of the sponsorship process. Do you feel that sponsoring laypress from the same budget that sponsors active contributors to UDS is a fair use of funds? If you knew that your ticket and hotel could have paid for an active contributor to show up and engage in discussions and take on work items that need to be done in the next cycle would you have chosen to give your sponsorship to that contributor?
-jef
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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 17, 2011 18:48 UTC (Tue) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
> do other corporate entities do this sort of tech laypress sponsorship
> to their equivalent events?
I don't really know about Google, Apple, or Red Hat's policies in this regard. They don't really have "equivalent" events as far as I can tell (FUDCon might be the exception there). I have been sponsored by the Linux Foundation for various events (LinuxCon, Collab, MeeGo, probably others), by GNOME for GUADEC, and by CELF for various ELC and ELCE events, perhaps others as well.
> I think you punched Shuttleworth in the mouth a little with your
Sorry you (and others evidently) think so, it was not my intent. I was trying to give an accurate picture of what he said.
> Do you consider yourself an active Ubuntu contributor?
No. As I understand it, my sponsorship did not go through the usual UDS sponsorship channels. It came, I think, from the marketing budget.
jake
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 27, 2011 6:51 UTC (Fri) by AdamW (guest, #48457) [Link]
I don't know much about RH policies, but I don't think RH or Fedora sponsors any journalists to FUDCon. Things might be different for more corporate shindigs like RH Summit, I dunno about that.
I know some conferences sponsor journalists to attend.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 18:55 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] We travel to a lot of conferences with assistance from the events involved. Do you really think that, over the last year, we could have reported from events in Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia, England, Hungary, etc. without it? We have a long-term goal of being able to pay more of our own travel, but it's a hard one to hit.The notion that we are, by virtue of writing about what happened at an event, somehow less deserving of travel sponsorship is just a little offensive. In general we have tended to avoid distribution-specific events (or desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we need to stick to that in the future.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:12 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Let me be very clear I'm not complaining. In fact I'm actually following up on a gripe about journo sponsorship made by a journo who is most assuredly in the Ubuntu camp. I'm asking questions because I'm generally curious about how this works. For completeness I've poked someone in the eye at Red Hat via private email to ask about how they handle journo sponsorship. This isn't a witch hunt, I'm information gathering.
I would say that if its common practice for an organizing entity to sponsor journos, I think sponsored journos should include that information in any article about the event as part of disclosure.
And since Jono's description of the UDS sponsoring process added just this week doesn't mention journos as a special group...I was misled into thinking it was a common budget based on the chatter I was seeing about the original gripe. If there's a separate pot of money for journos then its not a problem. But like I said, from the chatter I'm seeing, that's not necessarily the impression. A clear statement about how journos are selected which parallel's Jono's description of UDS contributor sponsorship would probably make things clearer.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:24 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] FWIW, I never apply to a conference as a "journo" - I apply as a member of the community. I have never really seen how the decisions are made, but I believe conference organizers apply the same approach to us as to anybody else: how much will the event be improved by our presence?A reasonable case could certainly be made for better disclosure of travel sponsorship, anyway.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:40 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Hmm, okay you personally don't go to conferences strictly as a journalist. Fair enough. But in this particular case Jake hasn't self assessed himself to be an Ubuntu contributor. So in this particular case, Jake went there primarily as a journalist covering a story.
And indeed having press at an event does add value for the journalist and the organizer and the readership. I would not suggest otherwise. But there are ethical considerations for the industry to consider when journalists are dependent on sponsorships from organizing entities.
I believe it would be adequate disclosure for anyone who attends and event and is sponsored to attend an event should disclose their sponsorship, whether they attended strictly as a contributor to participate or as a journalist to cover the story, or as a mix of both. It is good practice for a number of reason to disclose sponsorship depending on your particular situation as a sponsored individual. The GNOME devs who write personal blogs do a pretty good job consistently tagging GNOME Foundation sponsorships for events they attend and write about for example, though for completely different reasons than the reasons I would expect a journalist to disclose sponsorship to their readership.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 21:42 UTC (Tue) by mgross (subscriber, #38112) [Link]
I am very glad LWN gets sponsorships to attend and report what happens at these events. After reading through half of this thread I feel like I'm being trolled by a tinfoil hat.
Sponsorship Posted May 18, 2011 2:02 UTC (Wed) by nzjrs (subscriber, #35911) [Link]
> In fact I'm actually following up on a gripe about journo sponsorship made
> by a journo who is most assuredly in the Ubuntu camp
I'm presuming you are referring to the OMGUbuntu folks.
I think elevating or equating OMG with LWN is an insult to the quality and depth of reporting at LWN.
I guess I don't see what mystery there is to get to the bottom of.
If LWN was picked because they were better (more technical, more thorough) journalists then I cant disagree. If they were picked because it was their turn then I have no objection. I can't imagine a cynical third option (if the goal was to provide positive coverage) that would result in LWN being chosen over OMG.
Sponsorship Posted May 18, 2011 3:38 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'm not suggesting there's anything sinister or malevolent going on. I don't believe there is a tit-for-tat arrangement in place here or anything like that. And I don't think its a problem that Jake was sponsored to attend insofar as Canonical planned a budget for press separate from contributors. I'll try to verify that with Canonical peeps outside LWN. If any of them will actually talk to me still.
But I am stating that we'll all benefit from adequate disclosure about sponsorship. And I personally think the LWN team is probably the best example of journalistic standards in our little pocket of spacetime. And since I think that, I also think they'd listen to a reasonable request that such disclosures be made a common practice when such sponsorship occurs. Trust me, I'm not making a direct comparison between LWN and any other journalistic effort. There's no comparison.
To his credit, Jake didn't drag his feet about answering the question about sponsorship when I asked it. Asked and answered, no hedging no backpedaling..just a straight up answer..even though they know he openned himself up to criticism with the answer. I can't expect anything more than that. It's refreshing to get a clean answer even when the question is challenging in nature.
I'm not going to hold a grudge for the LWN team for not thinking about sponsorship disclosure as a matter of policy up till this point. I certainly didn't ever think about it before now. But I am thinking about it, and I think there's a reasonable chance they'll consider making disclosure part of their standard operating policy.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 18, 2011 4:01 UTC (Wed) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
> even though they know he openned himself up to criticism with
> the answer
I never really considered that, exactly. I have at various points thanked sponsors in my articles from conferences, typically in some kind of wrap-up article. But, I am sure I have forgotten more than a few times as well.
I have no problem "disclosing" that kind of information at all. But I am surprised that some think it is really all that significant in terms of determining biases. We all have biases, and most of what goes into those biases cannot be quantified by things like 'were sponsored to go to XYZ conference by ABC org'. There are plenty of other, less visible things that *could* be contributing to my biases (corporate subscriptions and advertising are two obvious possibilities).
In order to create a bias filter for a site or a writer, I think you have to read the material and compare it to what else you know of the subject of the article and go from there. Over some period of time, you will get a feel for where the biases are, and whether you trust the site/writer to, generally, accurately report things. I can certainly disclose that someone paid for some of the expenses to get me to a place where I could cover an event, but for all you know they (or a competitor) were handing me $100 bills hourly.
It just seems obvious to me that the only way to really figure out what the biases of a given writer/publication are is by reading it and forming your own opinions. Finding out about sponsorships might seem like it helps, and maybe it does, but it's really no substitute for reading and thinking about what's written.
jake
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:12 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I think if distributions consider LWN coverage important and request a editors presence and are willing to sponsor you, I don't think there is a important reason to refrain from doing so. Many of important free software projects compete with others and LWN reports one or the other depending on the release or conference or something else relevant. I don't see why distributions are special in that regard.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:20 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I don't see that accepting sponsorship to attend an event is a significant problem (and it doesn't matter if the event is distro specific or not), however it can be a slippery slope if journalists or sponsors allow it to affect their decisions (from the sponsor side, "X wrote bad things about the event last year, so I don't want to pay for them this year", from the writer side "I don't want to offend the people who paid my way here")
LWN does a very good job of being even-handed in it's reporting (better than any other organisation I know of writing about the industry), That may be why this article stood out in that if anything, the choice of quotes seems to be aimed at putting Mark in a bad light (very few articles have this many direct quotes), so LWN is definitely not falling down this slope.
I would be disappointed if concerns over this made it so that LWN appeared at fewer events.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 19:28 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
To be fair to Jake, this could be a faithful representation of Shuttleworth's state of mind on the subject. While these particular quotes are _disturbing_ there's no reason to overreach and suggest Jake means to paint Mark in a bad light. It could very well be Mark paints Mark in a bad light and I'm going the extra mile to give Mark the benefit of the doubt on that and I'm willing to withhold my intense scrutiny over these statements if there is a more expansive statement from Mark on its way into the public record. I'll give Mark till the end of the week to post a blog article which allows him to frame his arguments..without the name calling.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 20:44 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
parts of it I believe completely.
there has always been tension in the FOSS community between those who are willing to make compromises in order to provide needed functionality now and those who will do without the functionality until it's free.
Mark has clearly placed himself (and Ubuntu) in the camp of those willing to so things that the other camp isn't willing to do in order to provide functionality now. He is far from being alone in that camp (Linus is another vocal member of that camp) and his description of the other camp as being 'ideologues' is not unexpected (or, in my mind particularly inappropriate, what would)
the problem that he talks about where companies start to open up and get hammered for what they haven't opened yet rather than thanked for what they have opened is a serious problem
I also don't think that anyone disagrees with the '80% complete' problem that he describes.
the need or lack thereof for contributor agreements is a matter where there is a lot more disagreement. It's good that he isn't happy with the current Cannonical agreement, I don't think anyone is and the big thing that he needs to do is to make it clear what he is trying to do with this agreement and re-write the agreement to provide the appropriate guidelines (it may be good enough to add guarantees that the software will always be available under a particular license or class of license in addition to any proprietary licenses that are granted)
I do think that it's a good thing that Mark had decided that it's acceptable for Cannonical to sign contributer agreements when submitting patches to other projects , as that should reduce the friction involved.
but as long as the FSF is requiring contributor agreements, many of the more vocal people really have a hard time arguing that the concept of a contributor agreement is evil.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 21:04 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I still find it ironic that LibreOffice comes under fire from Mark, even though Canonical's first contribution to the codebase, as far as I am aware, was to the LibreOffice fork and not to the OpenOffice fork (either before or after the fork occured.) And I believe Ubuntu made the decision to switch to LibreOffice before Oracle jettisoned OpenOffice staffing. It's a bit revisionist of Mark to make the sort of accusations about the disruption LibreOffice caused to OpenOffice development when Canonical was more than eager to jump ship and support Libreoffice so quickly. I wonder if Canonical had taken a stand and said you know what, we are going to continue to stick with Oracle and OpenOffice because we "trust" Oracle to continue to provide sound leadership for the codebase..would that have changed the history of things. Ubuntu is soooo popular, if Canonical had decided to stick their neck out and support Oracle's leadership wouldn't that have been a game changer?
If he's going to talk the talk, Canonical needs to walk the walk. And with LibreOffice, Canonical walked away from corporate management of the codebase and embraced open co-development. Mark can't have his cake and eat it to, try as he might. Canonical showed real leadership in how quickly they embraced Libreoffice.
And he still gets the details of the Qt copyright assignment history wrong. Qt had a BSD relicense nuclear option for like a decade+ tied to its dual licensing model. If the open development tree closed down, a non-profit entities had the authority to relicense the last available open development codebase as BSD. That is a _huge_ offset against bad faith proprietary re-licensing. He continues to gloss over that history when holding up Qt. I've even said that Qt's nuclear option seemed like a fair trade-off to protect long term contributor interests. More disturbingly I don't believe the Harmony drafts make room for that sort of creative long term balance of interests..at least not explicitly. So if anything Harmony may push that sort of pragmatic balance of corporate and contributor business interests off the table as a future model for engagement.
Shuttleworth is not one to let little things like "facts" get in the way of his goals to craft perception and opinion towards the ends that best suit his personal interests.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 21:05 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"but as long as the FSF is requiring contributor agreements, many of the more vocal people really have a hard time arguing that the concept of a contributor agreement is evil."
I don't think anybody considers it "evil" and any such portrayal is very unhelpful however many would consider copyright assignment as problematic when commercial companies use it and it is especially problematic when people point to FSF as a justification for it as they invariably do because FSF is a non-profit organization with a legal mandate for serving the public while commercial organizations are not and FSF copyright assignment gives a legal guarantee and FSF's own history makes it clear that they would never release contributed code under a proprietary license.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 17, 2011 21:19 UTC (Tue) by quaid (guest, #26101) [Link]
"the problem that he talks about where companies start to open up and
get hammered for what they haven't opened yet rather than thanked for what they have opened is a serious problem"
So I work for Red Hat on community organizing, and have been involved with many discussions directly with real software vendors (ISVs) who range from a spectrum of "all code is already open source but no community around it" to "maybe we'll open source something one day."
This assertion that companies get treated poorly in open communities is not an uncommon fear of these companies. But where is the evidence?
When I have observed these many companies interacting in open communities, or thinking about it, or doing anything, it is rare that I have seen a truly poor interaction that originated from someone in the community. Some mis-communication happens, but rarely, rarely is it an outright attack of the sort Mr. Shuttleworth tells hearsay about.
Aside from the general recognition to treat all potential contributors fairly, even corporations, in the last decade there has been a growth in professional open source developers who impact the quality of discussion in the open communities. I'm sure there ARE companies who have bad experiences, and I'm sure that a percentage of those are not directly at fault for that reaction. But is it an actual problem? Or just perceived as one?
What are the real facts? How close is the reality to the unsupported assertion Mr. Shuttleworth seems to simply repeat?
Considering that this is cornerstone of his long-thinking on the subject, I would hope he has at least done some market research. Not just talked with peer executives at other ISVs, who all repeat the same urban legends without any more evidence than hearsay.
My contrast, I turn to Dr. Dan Frye, who is the VP of IBM's open source developer group. In the below video, he talks about how THEY made the mistakes in their initial forays in to open source development. He didn't blame the community for their reaction. He fixed his house. Today, IBM has a process for evaluating how to join an open source community so they can avoid stomping in with giant boots-of-destruction:
http://video.linux.com/video/1381
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 17, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I've witnessed numerous cases where companies start to open something and have people attacking them publicly (either for making mistakes as they start opening things up, or because they aren't being 'open enough' about some things, frequently about development for example)
This isn't just Mark imagining things.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 17, 2011 21:35 UTC (Tue) by quaid (guest, #26101) [Link]
"This isn't just Mark imagining things."
Agreed, nor am I imagining my own experience. (Which is that more companies strangle themselves in the open source crib than get strangled by external folks.)
But I'm not claiming my experience is the way things are, everywhere, and asking others to accept that anecdotal experience as unverified fact. Nor am I using it as the basis for an unpopular position.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 17, 2011 21:38 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I didn't read it that he is basing any position other than 'this is a problem' on the basis of these sorts of actions.
if saying that is an unpopular position, then more people need to take such an unpopular position.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 17, 2011 22:32 UTC (Tue) by quaid (guest, #26101) [Link]
"I didn't read it that he is basing any position ..."
If the problem isn't as he describes it, then perhaps his conclusion of what to do is not the right answer?
His direction regarding CLAs is at least called in to question if he is basing that direction on the opinion that there is a wide spread problem if there is no evidence of that problem other than anecdotal.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 18, 2011 1:06 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
as I was reading this, I didn't see him basing any actions or positions on the problems that companies have opening things, I read that as a separate complaint from the problems of getting the last 20% done. and I read him trying to deal with the 20% problem as the reason for pushing contributer agreements (along with the possibility of dual-licensing projects)
I don't think that his solution will solve the problem, but I think he's entitled to try it and see if he can make it work (there are a lot of companies out there that I would not have thought that there was enough to make it work)
I would disagree with straight copyright assignment, but I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the right to dual license (which is not the same as making proprietary derivatives). I see this as giving people who want to use the code two options 'support the project by contributing code' or 'support the project by contributing money so that the project can buy time to generate code'.
I know that some people are not willing to accept that as choice for their code (especially if they are outsiders, not part of the organization that would be getting the money), and to those folks I would say, find a different project to contribute to, there's no shortage of worthy causes. I will also guarantee that you will not always agree with the choices the organization makes, and for that it doesn't matter what organization, be it Cannonical or the FSF.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 18, 2011 8:33 UTC (Wed) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link] Hi,I've witnessed numerous cases where companies start to open something and have people attacking them publicly As have I. I would say that there are a number of factors at play here:
This is a really hard situation to be in as a company. If you mess up your first interaction with a project, you can spend years repairing the relationship & regaining trust. You do it in baby steps, by showing that you're learning, by entrusting individuals to represent you in communities, and by having those individuals do things in the community's interests. On the other hand, I have seen companies progressively increase their interaction with communities, and each additional step is met with approval and thanks. Or companies that are forthright that while their product is free software, that they're going to maintain control of their core product, and that's been accepted by their user community. The difference is in the fall from grace and loss of trust. So my best advice to companies thinking about interacting with a free software community is: start small, be honest with yourself & others. Gain trust through your actions, and then handle that trust carefully. Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 18, 2011 22:08 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sorry, but Sun did not fix their problem with Java (witness the heat Oracle is now raining on Android over that same code) or their other open source projects (placing OpenSolaris under their expressly not GPL compatible license). So it isn't that they invested years of hard work in regaining confidence, they lost whatever they had fair and square and did precious little to gain it back.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 19, 2011 7:23 UTC (Thu) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
> Sorry, but Sun did not fix their problem with Java
The main problem people had with Java is "it's not released under the GPL". Then it was. But that was too late, the confidence had been lost, and so people were looking for the catch, and they found it - "the conformance suit isn't available under a free licence".
If Sun's first announcement was "Java released under GPL, but Sun to maintain control of Java trademark" then I think everyone's reaction would have been "fair enough, woohoo". Because this was a 2nd or 3rd step, after an initial "freeing Java" announcement (and in combination with the history around Solaris), people were saying "boo, hiss - holding something back".
Which I think was mostly unfair.
> placing OpenSolaris under their expressly not GPL compatible license
Since when does every free software licence have to be GPL compatible? It would have been nice, but releasing it as free software is better than not releasing it as free software. This is a case in point of what Mark is saying - "not enough" is an all too frequent chant.
Cheers,
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 19, 2011 15:09 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>The main problem people had with Java is "it's not released under the GPL". Then it was. But that was too late, the confidence had been lost, and so people were looking for the catch, and they found it - "the conformance suit isn't available under a free licence".
You forgot 'passing the non-free conformance test is a condition for being able to use the numerous wide-reaching patents over which we will eventually sue you'. As catches go, a massive lawsuit probably counts as quite a big one.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 19, 2011 15:13 UTC (Thu) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
> You forgot 'passing the non-free conformance test is a condition for being
> able to use the numerous wide-reaching patents over which we will > eventually sue you'. As catches go, a massive lawsuit probably counts as > quite a big one.
Ah, I don't care about patents, and I encourage every other free software developer not to care about patents. It is an issue orthogonal to software freedom and the licence of the software.
Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 19, 2011 15:34 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Ah, I don't care about patents... It is an issue orthogonal to software freedom
Do you have any justification for this rather extraordinary assertion?
> and the licence of the software.
Yes, obviously.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 19, 2011 15:39 UTC (Thu) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
>> Ah, I don't care about patents... It is an issue orthogonal to software
>> freedom > Do you have any justification for this rather extraordinary assertion?
The Linux kernel is patent encumbered. The GIMP saved GIFs when LZW was still patented.
This does not prevent either from being free software.
Mind me asking what was extraordinary about my assertion?
Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 20, 2011 21:49 UTC (Fri) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
If you aren't allowed to use the software without explicit permission of a dictator (patent owner), how can you call that software free? It fails the first rule of software freedom.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 20, 2011 23:36 UTC (Fri) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
> If you aren't allowed to use the software without explicit permission of a
> dictator (patent owner), how can you call that software free? It fails the > first rule of software freedom.
Then no software is free.
Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 21, 2011 5:40 UTC (Sat) by faramir (subscriber, #2327) [Link]
>Then no software is free.
Are you saying that ALL software is covered by
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 21, 2011 6:29 UTC (Sat) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] It seems plausible to me. There are so many of them, so vague and so broad. And software contains so many parts that might infringe. It seems unlikely that there would be no overlap, for any program that does anything useful.Either way, how can you prove for any piece of software that it's not covered by any patents?
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted Jun 5, 2011 5:47 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
I'm pretty sure that any non-trivial piece of software is covered or might seem covered by at least one patent. And it doesn't really matter if the patent is stupid & obvious, or that the patent only seems to cover the software at first glance if you look at it from a weird angle but really doesn't, if a company with deep pockets sues you over it, you're screwed.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 21, 2011 9:54 UTC (Sat) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
There is a reason why patents are such a huge pain in the ass of free software; it's not orthogonal at all. But let's not overstate the problem. All software with a free software license can be considered free until it is actually found to infringe a patent.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 21, 2011 10:30 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and the patent holder decides to not license it for free software
for example, the RCU patent has been licensed to all software under the GPL IIRC
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 22, 2011 8:22 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
If a patent license is available, it is not a infringement anymore.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 22, 2011 21:13 UTC (Sun) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
> All software with a free software license can be considered free until it
> is actually found to infringe a patent.
I would say *proven* to infringe a patent. And that needs a court case. And a bucketload of money. And not $1 bills.
So, all software is free, and the patent system is broken, and keeps approving patents which, if challenged, would be invalidated. So, as I said, I don't worry about patents, and I don't think a patent should ever be a reason not to write a piece of free software.
Cheers,
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 22, 2011 23:11 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
patent infringement doesn't need to be proven to put a company out of business, a lawsuit is enough (it takes a lot of money to defend against a patent lawsuit)
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 27, 2011 7:04 UTC (Fri) by AdamW (guest, #48457) [Link]
dave: your position is all very well in the abstract, but it looks fairly absurd in the real world. As was pointed out, Sun was rather up front about the fact that it had a big patent stash, that you had to pass the conformance tests to be immune from the big patent stash, and that the conformance suite was not F/OSS and was not going to be. it's a bit oblique of you to pretend that all this is irrelevant to the practical issue of people actually believing that Sun wanted them to be able to exercise their F/OSS rights in relation to Java. You and I might think software patents are fundamentally broken and everyone should ignore them, but the District of East Texas doesn't, and people who want to hang on to their assets are going to listen to that...
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have Posted May 29, 2011 18:50 UTC (Sun) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
However, the district of East Texas doesn't (much as it might like to) have jurisdiction over the world.
For example, where I live, software patents are EXplicitly NOT permitted. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop the EPO granting them in contravention of their constitution :-(
Cheers,
Evidence - "problems" companies have Posted May 22, 2011 7:57 UTC (Sun) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
Yes, the evidence is quite out there. Watch for example the Nokia Maemo saga. Lots of people would complain that some modules of code (which those people had no intention of ever modifying) were not open source. Complaining rather than celebrating the fact that company moved from 100% closed source to 90% open source.
Evidence - "problems" companies have Posted May 22, 2011 8:09 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
In my two+ years of working with Nokia on Calligra for Maemo and MeeGo they have always been exemplary. Working upstream, in our bugzilla, in our code repository, with us, coming to sprints and events, taking responsibility to grow the community by engaging with students. And with immensely valuable results, like much better import filters, new text engine for Words and lots, lots more.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 20:50 UTC (Tue) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]
QUOTE: if anything, the choice of quotes seems to be aimed at putting Mark in a bad light (very few articles have this many direct quotes)
It's impossible to know if the choice of quotes is aimed at anything, or is instead a fair representation of the interview. That's why journalists often keep a recording. Given Jake's previous reporting it might be fair to assume that he managed to capture the essence of the interview and in order to reinforce his interpretation provided quotes to anchor it.
If you look at the companion piece[1] about UDS you'll see that the same style (short, inlined quotes) is used.
Sponsorship Posted May 17, 2011 21:51 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
This article seems very consistent with the other things Mark Shuttleworth has said and done in the last few years. He clearly believes in copyright assignment and finding ways to monetize FOSS on the desktop.
He is clearly frustrated that FOSS is a cost center rather than a profit center for companies. For example, Google and Facebook spend money on FOSS to support their operations, but they don't directly make money from FOSS. It is an expense for them, like air conditioning or health care.
Shuttleworth seems to think that using copyright assignment, companies can offer premium version of their projects alongside open source ones. This would allow them to generate a revenue stream of their own.
It would have been nice to have fewer, longer excerpts from the speech. Having just a few whole paragraphs would probably have been better. But it's not like the content of this speech should surprise anyone. He's been saying these things for years. It's kind of like seeing "breaking news: Pope thinks Jesus is a great guy" in the headlines.
P.S. I don't think I agree with Mark... copyright assignment seems to separate communities into first-class citizens who get the profit from selling proprietary licenses and second-class citizens who never will. But that's another issue and it's been discussed many times elsewhere...
Sponsorship Posted May 18, 2011 9:44 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Google and Facebook spend money on FOSS to support their operations, but they don't directly make money from FOSS. They may not actually make money, but it certainly saves them money. Linux lets Google use commodity PCs for their server farms, and imagine the aggregated cost of those Windows licenses/maintenance/ . Besides, I'm sure that, from a strategy POV, Google would hate being dependent on their biggest competitor for their operating system. If Linux didn't exist, it might even be worth Google's while to write their own operating system just to be »free«.
Sponsorship Posted May 18, 2011 21:02 UTC (Wed) by piggy (subscriber, #18693) [Link]
> In general we have tended to avoid distribution-specific events (or desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we need to stick to that in the future.
It would sadden me if this were the outcome. I certainly appreciated the coverage reported here. I count on LWN occasionally attending many of the conferences that I would love to attend myself.
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 9:13 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
> In general we have tended to avoid distribution-specific events (or
> desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that > somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend > every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we > need to stick to that in the future.
No, please don't. It gives us a chance to learn what's going on at other distributions. I like to hear about UDS or about Fedora meetings, it's interesting information. Please, don't let the jspaleta's obsessed search for Shuttleworth/Canonical misdoings influence your journalistic decisions. That you can let the respective organizations pay for your travel and conference costs, is a trust situation that you (both you personally, and LWN.net as a whole) earned with impartial reporting in the past.
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 9:30 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
> In general we have tended to avoid distribution-specific events (or desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we need to stick to that in the future.
I personally wish that you would _not_ stick to that in the future. The conference reports are, at least to me, useful and interesting.
Please (*please*) don't let (what I see as) jspaleta "trolling on all things Ubuntu" influence LWN policies and choices. I mean, are we to get less coverage on Ubuntu because jspaleta has nothing better to do than post 50 times in _every_ Ubuntu/Canonical story?
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 10:11 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Wow....
And again, I'll re-iterate that I'm not complaining about Jake's attendance at UDS. I'm _not_ asking for some sort of sham "fair and balanced" stupidity for event coverage either. I do not expect LWN to try to be at every possible event to cover all bases and all factions. And like you I don't think they should go out of their way to avoid "camp" specific events either.
I do think its better for all of us in the readership that travel sponsorship is disclosed as a matter of policy. And to Jake's credit he added a sponsorship thank you in the newest weekly edition article summarizing the UDS experience, which more than meets any reasonable sponsorship disclosure request I could ask for as a member of the readership.
It could very well be that we need to find more ways to get press sponsored to attend conference events to raise the profile of working going on in the ecosystem. And I have no problem with that, as long as we make it a cultural norm to disclose sponsorship.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 14:07 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] And again, I'll re-iterate... Most of us heard you the first time, even if you for some reason feel that one particular commenter didn't. Please do us all the favor of stating your position once as well as you can, and then sitting out unless you have something to say that an intelligent reader wouldn't be able to figure out on their own from a previous post. (Apologies for the off-topic post.)
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 15:44 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Nope. I will not restrict myself to a single shot at explaining myself. But I will endeavor to limit myself to two additional attempts to restate a point when I feel something may have been communicated poorly.
-jef
Sponsorship Posted May 19, 2011 14:01 UTC (Thu) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]
Definitely. If possible, try and get LWN folks anywhere you can in terms of conferences and meetups. Lots of really cool developments and ideas come out of them, whether they seem to be distro- or desktop-specific.
Also +1 on not letting jspaleta put you off!
Sponsorship Posted May 20, 2011 18:59 UTC (Fri) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
jspaleta does occasionally seem a little Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth obsessed. But IMO his comments on this article have been quite constructive. In fact, he seems determined to give Shuttleworth more benefit of the doubt than the interview implies he should have.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 17, 2011 22:06 UTC (Tue) by pzb (subscriber, #656) [Link]
While I'm not sure what you consider "equivalent events", I am aware that it is common to provide press passes as no charge for events and to pay some or all of the travel costs for select press and/or analysts. For commercial industry events, I have even seen the sponsor/show owner create special events for analysts, such as ski weekends or broadway show tickets.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 18, 2011 0:47 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Do you some specific event sponsors you want to call out by name? I'm planning on trying to contact up to 10 different FLOSS ecosystem entities (for-profit and non-profit alike) in my effort to get a sense of what the cultural norm is. Like I said this isn't a witch hunt, I'm genuinely interested in knowing what the current norm is for handling of press access to events and what the sponsoring entities expect in terms of disclosure from journalists.
-jef
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 18, 2011 1:22 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
free access for the press is very common (and the definition of 'press' is pretty slippery in the FOSS world)
providing assistance for press to attend is less common in the FOSS world, if for no other reason than that the budgets tend to be small.
but in the commercial world, high-value give-aways are very common, even to attendees. This is a large part of the reason that many press people end up getting the reputation as shills and I believe that it's a large part of the reason that the traditional press (including many magazines) are of such poor quality.
I can't point at specifics on the commercial side, but if you read the write-ups after just about any major commercial event, it seems pretty obvious.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 18, 2011 1:30 UTC (Wed) by pzb (subscriber, #656) [Link] I was thinking of events like:
There are tons more, these are just a few that come to mind. I'm not sure if you would call all of these FLOSS ecosystem entities, but all contribute to FLOSS or have large percentages their software running on Linux. Admittedly none of these is really the same as UDS, but Canonical does not run a user conference similar to the above to my knowledge.
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