No, communities are only powerful if they're internally organised
No, communities are only powerful if they're internally organised
Posted Nov 7, 2013 11:54 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)Parent article: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities
Depends who's calling the shots.
If some official body is more powerful than the community, then they really can impose a decision and choose to live with the backlash.
Two examples: Fedora and Mozilla.
Red Hat said they'd hand Fedora over to the community but then backtracked and maintained a majority of votes on the governing board. The community complained. Then everyone got back to working on Fedora.
Mozilla was a purely free software project, then they announced they'd be adding a binary/proprietary codec. The community complained, but no one abandoned Mozilla.
In both cases, the governing board correctly calculated their power relative to the community.
My point here isn't that Red Hat or Mozilla were wrong. My point is that Seigo's advice, while being music to the ears of us users and volunteers, doesn't reflect reality.
Posted Nov 7, 2013 12:26 UTC (Thu)
by chithanh (guest, #52801)
[Link] (3 responses)
You mean the Cisco H.264 codec plugin? It is open source and released under a permissive license.
Posted Nov 7, 2013 14:21 UTC (Thu)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (2 responses)
Not quite. There's an open source / free software version available, but it seems Mozilla won't be using that version and their software will instead download and use a binary provided by Cisco.
The binary isn't released under a copyleft licence, so Cisco has no legal obligation for source code of the free software version to actually correspond to the binary.
Posted Nov 8, 2013 12:35 UTC (Fri)
by jpnp (guest, #63341)
[Link] (1 responses)
The point is not the (unpatentable) source code, but the fact that Cisco have a patent license to distribute that binary. Given the motivations for this I see no reason for Cisco's binary not to match their open source code.
Unless, of course, government organisations are pressuring them to put nefarious backdoors in. Ideally, one would be able to build a binary from the open code which is identical to the Cisco binary, to ensure this isn't the case. I don't know enough about the code, or dev-chain in question, to know how possible that is in this instance.
Posted Nov 9, 2013 16:13 UTC (Sat)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link]
Having equivalent source code available isn't the point. What makes free software great is that it's developed by its users or by people who answer to the users because the developers know that if they put in nasty features, or leave out features that users want, the software can be forked and they just lose their users.
I want projects and distros to be involved in the development of the software I get. I want them to be in control rather than just being a conduit.
No, communities are only powerful if they're internally organised
The interface is open and if you don't like the patent situation around Cisco's H.264 implementation, you can write your own and Mozilla based browsers will happily use it instead. Just like they used GStreamer for H.264 until now.
No, communities are only powerful if they're internally organised
Mozilla and binary H.264
Mozilla and binary H.264