My attempt to understand Open Source-Part 2
How did the Apache community decide who are the trusted members?
"For Apache, we started with eight people who really trusted each other, and as new people showed up at the discussion forum and offered patch files posted to the discussion forum, we would gain trust in others, and that eight grew to over thousand."
When did open source first gain acceptance and backing from from professionally run companies?
IBM was trying to sell its own proprietary Web server, called GO, but couldnt succeed. Apache turned out to be better technolgy and free. So, IBM decided if it cant beat Apache, it must join hands with Apache.
This was an important turn in the history of open source. The worlds biggest computer company decided that its engineers could not beat the work of an ad hoc collection of geeks, so they threw out their own technology and decided to go with the geeks!
So, how did it benefit IBM monetarily?
IBM held a meaningful conversation with Apache people and helped create the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation. With the help of lawyers, they helped in creating a legal framework so that there would no copyright issues for IBM. IBM wanted to build application on top of Apache and charge money for them. IBM saw the value in having a standard vanilla web server architecture, which was constantly being improved for free by an open source community.
The legal framework said. "You need to be able to vet the code, sign an agreement, and deal with liability issues. Anybody can download the Apache code. The only obligation is that they acknowldge that it came from the site, and if they make any changes that they share them back." You were also allowed to out and build a patended commercial product on top of the Apache code, as IBM did with its WebSphere server product. While it wanted the foundations to be free and open to all, it recognized that it would remain strong and fresh if both the commercial and non commercial engineers had an incentive to participate.
This model has been widely adopted, after even one saw it propelled IBM's Web server business to commercial leadership in that category of softare, generating huge amounts of revenue.
THE FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT
The free softaware movement was and remains inspired by the ethical idea that software should be free and available to all, and it relies on open source collaboration to help produce the best fostware possible to be distributed for free.
This is a bit different from the approach of the intellectual commons. Apache saw open sourcing as a technically superior means of creating software and other innovations and it had no problem with commercial software being built on top of it.
However, the goal of the free software movement, was to get as many people as possible improving and distributing software for free, out of belief that this will empower everyone and free individuals from the grip of global coprparations. The free software movement structures its licenses so that if your commercial software draws directly from their free software copyright, they ent your software to be free too.
The GNU/GPL story
(to be contd...)
Posted at 06:04AM Aug 21, 2007 by rainmaker in Personal | Comments[0]