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Posted by webmink ( Jun 02 2006, 06:21:07 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]
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License enables governance, though, as it indicates initial intent of the license holders and provides a baseline of trust which parties can fall back on when governance goes awry. To put it another way, license is an explicit social contract- without license you have to rely on the goodwill of other parties, which is messy and inefficient.

Posted by Luis on June 03, 2006 at 03:37 AM PDT #

Luis: I do agree to a large extent - there's a limit to how much of a thesis I can write in a del.icio.us comment! However, the license can only specify the relationship of the developer to the code; it can do little to define the relationship of the developer to other developers or to the market.

I continue to assert that good governance is too often overlooked, and that the effectiveness of an open source community (Apache for example) is derived from its governance and social contract of which the license then becomes and expression and not a definition.

Posted by Simon Phipps on June 04, 2006 at 07:42 AM PDT #

I do agree to a large extent - there's a limit to how much of a thesis I can write in a del.icio.us comment!

Fair :) I didn't mean to pounce, just wanted to get some elaboration on what seemed like an interesting and challenging point. I completely agree that good governance is important, especially in a large community like opensolaris or Java, where things are just too large for everyone to know everyone else.

However...
the license can ... do little to define the relationship of the developer to other developers or to the market.

Hrm. Doesn't the GPL's share-alike properties make it clear that all developers are on a basically equal playing field- if you modify my code, I get a copy of the modifications, and vice-versa? That's not just a relationship of developer to code, but also of developer to developer. Similarly, doesn't the original MPL make it clear that one group of developers is privileged over another group (particularly with regards to the market)? And BSD make it clear that no developers are contractually bound to do anything for one another?

The BSD example demonstrates that the requirements of the license are not determinative in and of themselves (otherwise there would be no BSD community to speak of), but it seems clear to me that ownership of the shared IP (typically code but also marks) is the foundation upon which all other governance is built. To grossly oversimplify, if the license isn't open, the governance can't be meaningfully open, because the dominant IP owner is still the real power. If the license is open, the governance can eventually grow in the right direction (through community growth or fork.)

As an example, I strongly believe the ownership issues around the trademark are a big part of why Fedora is still struggling to figure itself out. It is 'just' licensing, but it is indicative of the power relationships between developers in that project, and that infects everything else they are trying to do. I leave any extrapolations about Java governance and licensing to the reader. ;)

Ah, well, I've bored everyone except the open source governance/license geeks, so I'll shut up, but I'm curious to discuss this with you further, Simon. See you at GUADEC :)

Posted by Luis on June 04, 2006 at 12:18 PM PDT #

Luis: Yes, we're in wild agreement. My point is that the license can never hope to be more than a starting point and a set of limit conditions. For example, MySQL may use the GPL but still has no external committers because of the way the project is governed.

As you say, factors like trademarks are crucial and can deeply affect the structure of a community, as can voting rights, commit privilege allocation and more. Yes, there's always the option to fork, but many programmers value the ability to influence the "master" codebase above the ability to go their own way.

This is a conversation that is way overdue for the wider community of communities. We are prone to treat anything with a good license as acceptable, but there are obvious examples where that is not true and establishing benchmarks for governance seems to me to be essential to the future of the F/OSS movement.

Posted by Simon Phipps on June 04, 2006 at 01:33 PM PDT #

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