Open Source Initiative loses corporate status [LWN.net]

The 451 Group reports that the Open Source Initiative failed to get its paperwork together in time, so the corporation has been suspended by the state of California. "We are concerned about the impact that the suspension of the Open Source Initiative could have on open source developers, users, projects, and associated investors and vendors. The 451 Group has clients in all of the above categories so we believe it is appropriate to inform them of the suspension of the Open Source Initiative's legal status and how it might impact them. We are in the process of creating a formal analysis of the situation for 451 Group clients. We also believe that the potential impact is significant enough that, while the bare facts are already public, the issue deserves to be brought to the attention of the wider open source community. We will let the members of that community come to their own conclusions about what it means to them." Your editor is still struggling to figure out whether there will be any "impact" at all.

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Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 18:39 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (16 responses)

This reader is not struggling. It will exactly as much impact as when it existed.

Where licensing really matters

Posted Oct 6, 2009 21:44 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Whether or not a package made it into Debian and Fedora is a much better real-world test of opensourceitude than whether the license passed OSI, anyway.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 7, 2009 1:10 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (14 responses)

But without the OSI, Open Source license proliferation might get out of control.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 7, 2009 5:41 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (13 responses)

I don't think that's the case. OSI has approved innumerous licenses and in practise only a few are widely used and OSI doesn't determine their usage. On the other hand, OSI has approved confusing licenses such as the Artistic License 1.0 in the past.

Fedora Project has the most comprehensive list of Free and open source licenses in the world that I am aware of, far more than either FSF or OSI.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main

If you do a quick check on the RPM metadata which embeds the license tags, GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD and Apache remain the popular ones. With GPLv3, they are all compatible with each other as well.

OSI could have done several useful things but I am not sure they are making enough of a impact as they should be at this point.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 7, 2009 9:20 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (12 responses)

No, they are not "all compatible with each other".

3-clause BSD and Apache 1.0 are not compatible with GPL (the advertising clause). The renaming clause of Apache (derived products may not use the word Apache) is also GPL-incompatible I believe. Sun's CDDL is incompatible with GPL (so, no kernel-space ZFS for Linux). Even GPL2-only software (such as the Linux kernel) is not compatible with GPL3. And so on.

Basically, in most cases, GPL is only compatible with itself.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 7, 2009 10:03 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (11 responses)

The specific licenses I wanted to highlight the BSD (revised), MIT, Apache 2 and GPL v3. BSD with advertising clause is deprecated and not used as much these days. You are stretching it a bit as there are many GPL compatible licenses. You can find a list of them in the Fedora Licensing page. Also at

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompat...

Since you mentioned Sun CDDL, you might also be interested in reading about that among other things at

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 8, 2009 1:18 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (10 responses)

What I dislike is that, in practice, "GPL compatible" means "compatible only if the resulting combined work is licensed under the GPL". This means even GPL2 (like the Linux kernel) is not GPL3-compatible. It's a one-way street.

I also think the article you link to is unfair to the impact of the BSD and MIT licenses. Historically they gave us the networking stack, the X window system and a huge set of utilities. If the original TCP/IP stack had been GPL'd, all the commercial guys would have rolled their own, and we wouldn't have the internet. If X had been GPL'd, the Unix world would have developed a bunch of proprietary and incompatible interfaces. There are GPL'd implementations of SSH, but OpenSSH is the standard. I can't think of a single piece of GPL software that has become an industry standard the way these things have. RMS himself recommended the BSD licence for Ogg Vorbis, if I remember right, because the goal was to try and make it a standard. Of course, it's all "GPL compatible" which means it can be embraced and extended -- in one direction only. The FLOSS community is well known for protesting loudly when a certain commercial company does that.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 8, 2009 1:23 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> What I dislike is that, in practice, "GPL compatible" means "compatible only if the resulting
> combined work is licensed under the GPL".

That's not just "in practice"! The GPL itself contains that restriction:
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted
herein"

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 8, 2009 1:29 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

That is why BSD-licensed work is "GPL compatible"; but my point is that you cannot license the resulting work under the BSD license. GPL + anything else = GPL, if allowed at all.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 8, 2009 14:16 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (7 responses)

I'm the author of the referenced article. I completely agree that X-windows, TCP, and so on are important works, and we should thank the folks who developed them (thanks!). But it's not true that all important FLOSS works are BSD/MIT licensed. There are also GPL'ed works that are very widely used and mostly "own" their niche. GCC and MySQL come to mind immediately. Also, while there are many *BSD users, they are completely dwarfed by the number of Linux kernel users; Linux has far broader device support and far greater CPU scaleability.

That is not the primary point I'm trying to make, anyway. At no time do I claim that everyone should choose the GPL. Heck, I've released different software under the MIT, LGPL, and GPL licenses myself. I do claim that you should choose a GPL-compatible license, which includes the BSD-new and MIT licenses. Most people who prefer the GPL or LGPL licenses will aid projects with BSD and MIT licenses; even Stallman recommends helping such projects, and using their license.

In contrast, if you choose a GPL-incompatible license, many people will not help, and maybe even create a competing project. And that is my point - choosing a GPL-incompatible license is a bad idea. XFree86 is a case in point: the project lead, of the project which was the X implementation of the time, tried to switch from the MIT license to an new license that was GPL-incompatible. That "minor" license change had little effect, except that it was GPL-incompatible. But that's like saying "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" GPL-incompatibility has a massive impact. Changing XFree86 to a GPL-incompatible license was so massive that it caused a rare successful project fork. Which is pretty strong evidence that you should choose a GPL-compatible license.

The parent post complained that "in practice, 'GPL compatible' means 'compatible only if the resulting combined work is licensed under the GPL' ... it's a one-way street". Well, yes, it's a "one-way street" if you combine an MIT-licensed work with a GPL'ed work; it essentially becomes GPL'ed. But it's also a one-way street if you combine an MIT-licensed work with a proprietary work; it becomes proprietary. BSD-style licenses are specifically designed to allow the software to be "captured" by another project and not returned to the original project. If you don't like the "capturing" aspect of BSD-style licenses when you release an OSS project, use a different license instead, such as the LGPL or GPL.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 8, 2009 15:26 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (6 responses)

GCC and MySQL are important but don't define internet standards. (Well, because of its ubiquity some of GCC's features have been copied by others -- but that's about it.) MySQL has free competitors, notably Postgres; and while GCC had no alternative till recently, LLVM is looking very exciting now.

In theory, mixing BSD with proprietary code is as much a one-way street as mixing BSD with GPL; but in practice that is not always so. Most proprietary code has well-defined copyright holders who can, and do, choose to relicense their code under the BSD licence (perhaps after recouping their initial investment). The most recent example I can think of is the adding of journalling features to UFS in NetBSD. Commercial companies also contribute regularly to several BSD/MIT/similarly-licensed projects, including X.org, LLVM, etc. Because of the BSD licence, they can continue to use their contributions in their proprietary software; if it were GPL'd, they would find it hard to re-use their own code without GPL-ing everything they have (at best, they would need to be very vigilant in keeping it "clean" and free of others' copyrights).

GPL copyright holders are seldom willing to relicense their work under the BSD licence -- in fact I can't think of any examples.

The point about GPL incompatibility causing problems is perhaps true, but unfortunate. In the XFree86 case, however, there were many other problems even before the licence change, and the split would likely have happened anyway.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 8, 2009 18:04 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

> GPL copyright holders are seldom willing to relicense their work under the BSD licence -- in fact I can't think of any examples.

I think this is only true inasmuch BSD people don't actually ask, but go whine about the BSD incompatibility instead. I've heard from many people that they'd willingly open their code to the BSDs if they'd bother to ask.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 8, 2009 22:05 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

if it were GPL'd, they would find it hard to re-use their own code without GPL-ing everything they have (at best, they would need to be very vigilant in keeping it "clean" and free of others' copyrights).

This statement is rubbish. They can easily demand that contributors sign some kind of agreement to give them whatever rights they need - they can ignore whatever contributors don't comply. There's no difference here to the BSD licence - except that with their BSD licenced product they need not even get to see what other people are doing with their code.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 9, 2009 1:47 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Read what you're replying to before replying. The statement was about contributions to others' code. Sun can of course demand copyright assignment for OpenOffice.org contributions (and they do), but can't do the same for abiword or Koffice contributions. If, say, Sun contributed a Microsoft Word import filter to abiword, they can of course also use the same code in StarOffice; but if someone else improved that filter, Sun couldn't use those improvements in StarOffice.

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 9, 2009 14:34 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

It's still rubbish.

If company X puts their code out there and are the 'upstream' for that code
(i.e. the place where contributors prefer to get their changes put back to)
then any people who contribute to that code will either:

a) Be inclined to co-operate with company X, in which case they'll be happy
to give X whatever licence they desire (via a contributor agreement or by
licensing their contribution under the BSD licence, etc)

b) Not be inclined to co-operate, and so not get their code putback to the
'upstream' project. In the GPL case, they'll not agree to the CA. In the BSD
case it means they won't make their code available at all.

I'm not trying to bash the BSD, but it's baffling to find there are people who
would argue the BSD licence is encourages modifications to be made
available to the original coder and prevents forking (proprietary and
otherwise). It surely flies in the face of all historical evidence to claim this.

You may just use the code, it's free!

Posted Oct 8, 2009 23:32 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> GPL copyright holders are seldom willing to relicense their work
> under the BSD licence -- in fact I can't think of any examples.

That's because, if they wanted their work to be BSD-licensed, they
would have used the BSD licence in the first place. And indeed they
often do, and indeed the same people and businesses often contribute
their work to various codebases under different licences, co-operating
fully with the upstream maintainers, even making copyright assignments
to the projects' owners where that is the done thing.

Now if something were originally written as a contribution to a
GPL-licensed program (for instance, a device driver for the Linux
kernel), and a BSD-licensed project could make good use of that
code, there is nothing stopping someone who wishes to port the
code from asking the original author(s) of the code in question
to relicense it under BSD terms. I know it doesn't happen much
(either the asking nicely or the actual relicensing) but there
is probably a wide range of reasons for both sides of that,
from corporate inertia to OS favouratism and NIH syndrome to
being true copyleft believers.

But since the GPL places no restrictions at all on your use of
the code, only on the way you pass it on to others, there is
nothing stopping the would-be porter from doing the technical
work anyway and simply distributing the resulting whole under
the terms of the GPL. If, for whatever bizarre reason, someone
desperately needed to run a GPL device driver in a kernel of
BSD origin and the device driver author was unwilling to
relicense it.

It's free software, after all!

GPL-compatible != GPL, BSD-style licenses DESIGNED to be 1-way street

Posted Oct 12, 2009 6:31 UTC (Mon) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

Most proprietary code has well-defined copyright holders who can, and do, choose to relicense their code under the BSD licence (perhaps after recouping their initial investment). The most recent example I can think of is the adding of journalling features to UFS in NetBSD.

So NetBSD finally gets a journalled file system in 2009; I think you need to try harder than that if you wish to impress the GPL aficionados. After all, the GPL licensed Linux got a journalled file system in 2001, and by now there is a plethora of them (ext3, ext4, xfs, jfs, probably others as well including btrfs which isn't journalling but accomplishes the same thing by COW). Some of these (xfs, jfs) were contributed by commercial companies, and ones developed from scratch (ext3/4, btrfs) have been developed mostly by people working for commercial companies.

Wrt X, I think you are correct that a GPL licensed (or rather copyleft-like licensed, as GPL wasn't around then) would never have been accepted by the unix vendors at the time. Of course, then the vendors tried to outcompete each others by adding proprietary extensions to their own versions (which a copyleft license, had it been accepted, would have prevented), while letting the common X code stagnate, and the "unix wars" were ultimately won by Microsoft. How's that for karma?

But X.org seems alive now again since the XFree86/X.org fork, and while the license hasn't changed, the culture towards code sharing certainly has changed since the unix wars.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 18:58 UTC (Tue) by jhoger (guest, #33302) [Link]

In California, as a corporation, every year you get a letter in the mail that requires you to re-file the SOI (statement of information) with the Secretary of State for your business. There's a fee of $25.00. It's one page, front/back, most of which you can cover by just checking a box saying "nothing changed." You can do it all online.

Did they just not respond to that? If so I guess they just need to file a couple other forms now and never do that again...

Not much of a story.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 19:01 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (2 responses)

No impact whatsoever. The number of corporations I've seen who forget to file paperwork is amusingly high - and I'm the kind of guy who checks the filings of almost every business I interact with (even small coffeeshops).

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 19:51 UTC (Tue) by jhoger (guest, #33302) [Link] (1 responses)

Uh, I'll bite... why do you find this a productive way to spend your time?

Maybe the answer will give us some insight into what motivates the "451 Group."

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 20:46 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Ever actually looked to see who owns the corporations you do business with? I have a new rule in my life which is to know who is behind the facade and who I'm supporting with my business - and Google quickly turns up records that can be very enlightening. My review process is ongoing - I started with supermarkets, then drug stores, and coffee shops. Anywhere you spend money you are supporting some organization you often know nothing about.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 19:14 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

The 451 Group should be suspended for filing too much paperwork.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 6, 2009 19:25 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

"Who?" he said sarcastically.

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 7, 2009 6:18 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (1 responses)

I am shocked, shocked!, to hear that something founded by Bruce Perens is flittering between pointlessness and non-existence.

Has Bruce lost his golden touch?

Open Source Initiative loses corporate status

Posted Oct 9, 2009 18:45 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

I haven't been associated with the organization in 10 years. I didn't even do their corporate formation. But they'll find a way to blame me anyway.