Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have

Posted May 17, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have by quaid
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

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] (3 responses)

"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 (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

"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 (guest, #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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (18 responses)

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:

Companies who are honest about the extent of their investment in community projects get a lot of credit. Companies who are not honest about the extent of their investment (potentially to themselves) get criticised.

What I mean by this is: if a company makes an announcement that "we're releasing software X, it's going to be completely community run", and then the governance rules are blatantly skewed to favour the company, then they're going to be criticised. If instead they say "we're releasing this as open source software, but we plan to continue maintaining the core (but patch proposals are welcome)" they will get a free pass.
Companies who leave themselves open to criticism like this lose respect fast, and there is a significant faction in most communities that are extremely, aggressively harsh towards entities they don't respect.

This is not a good state of affairs - and I would like to see the vocal minority think of companies as groups of individuals, each worthy of basic respect, rather than a big amorphous entity that you can freely kick around without hurting anyone's feelings.
Companies which are trusted, and lose that trust, have a long, hard battle to gain it back.

Take the example of Sun, who announced open-sourcing of Solaris after a successful collaboration with GNOME. They never recovered from the criticism they got for OpenSolaris, Java, etc - and nothing they did (including for example relicencing Java as GPL) was good enough to regain the trust they'd lost by messing up the initial release of OpenSolaris. Canonical feels to me to be in a similar situation - slowly spending their community capital and progressively losing the trust of their supporters, until no matter what they do they will be criticised because it won't be good enough.

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] (17 responses)

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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (16 responses)

> 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,
Dave.

Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have

Posted May 19, 2011 15:09 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (15 responses)

>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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (14 responses)

> 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 (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (13 responses)

>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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (12 responses)

>> 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] (11 responses)

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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (10 responses)

> 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] (2 responses)

>Then no software is free.

Are you saying that ALL software is covered by
patents? That seems implausible.

Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have

Posted May 21, 2011 6:29 UTC (Sat) by dark (guest, #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] (6 responses)

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 (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #55185) [Link] (3 responses)

> 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,
Dave.

Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have

Posted May 22, 2011 23:11 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #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 (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

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 (subscriber, #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,
Wol