Tuesday October 20, 2009 ☞ Going With The Grain
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Fascinating to see Stallman admit that the GPL does not guarantee software freedom. Nothing new to see in this letter, which (unlike the article from Carlo Piana) fails to confront the consequences of its action.
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This issue is devoted to explaining open source to government standards people. It's a fine effort, well worth passing on to your favourite legislator's researcher.
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"Europeans and North Americans come at the commerce of FOSS differently, Europeans want to make a business from free software while not loosing its fundamental ethos while North Americans want to maximize the business exploitation of open source software and keep its nature, if it benefits them." -- Another analysis might be that the American approach sees open source as a "natural resource to be exploited" whereas the European approach sees software freedom as a resource to be cultivated in order to yield opportunity.
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"According to Matt, we should be thanking IBM for doing this: to my mind, IBM should be thanking the community for the contribution that has enabled it to recoup its investment so quickly" - reinforcing the point that every participant in an open source community is there out of self-interest of some kind, and that's not a bad thing.
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"For those who are trying to run an open source business, it is clear that pragmatism, rather than puritanical beliefs, is key to business growth." -- Yes, but sometimes there is a spark in those "puritanical beliefs" that embodies truth that should not be wantonly discarded just becuase a Puritan is involved. (The appallingly-named Gartner piece linked from this article is worth reading by the way.)
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Data from 451 suggesting that business models that go with the grain of software freedom (rather than cutting across it by attempting to retain company control) are coming to favour in the commercial open source space.
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Powerful arguments from an unexpected source (Carlo is one of the leading software freedom lawyers in Europe).
Posted by webmink
( Oct 20 2009, 05:07:17 AM PDT )
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Sigh... The Stallman/ letter is quite weak. For example, it says: "MySQL uses the parallel licensing approach to generate revenue to continue the FLOSS development of the software" which ignores the larger, and faster growing, segment of enterprise subscriptions, which does not depend on dual license.
Posted by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart on October 20, 2009 at 07:21 AM PDT #
RMS should practice what he preaches!
I am really annoyed, that RMS uses any occasion to spread his dogmatism, in this case on the expense on several thousands of Sun employees, who are waiting to see an perspective for their work again. I'm not a Sun employee myself, but have many friends there and can see some are struggling with uncertainty. In between RMS is one of the prominent speakers at an event in China, that is mostly sponsored by companies who never contributed anything to free software.
http://www.zeuux.org/campaign/zeuux-summit-2009.cn.html
Posted by Peter Junge on October 20, 2009 at 06:27 PM PDT #
Hopefully, this letter did not influence the EU in their decision to reject the Oracle-Sun deal. After all, there was this glowing letter from Marten Mickos in support of the acquisition: http://bit.ly/19mJQl
Posted by Prakash Narayan on October 21, 2009 at 02:30 PM PDT #