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July 25, 2007
Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?
Listening ot a panel entitled "Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?" at OSCON 2007.
Panelists are Chris DiBona (Google), Brian Behlendorf (CollabNet), John Roberts (SugarCRM), Ross Mayfield (Social Text), and Michael Tiemann (RedHat, Inc and president of OSI). The panel is moderated by Danese Cooper (Intel and Open Source Initiative (OSI)).
The OSI is a collaborative conversation with anyone. People can bring licenses to OSI and get approval to determine if a license is open source.
John starts to talk about how this panel came about because SugarCRM was asking questions. They have built an enterprise software package and would like to see an attribution clause in an open source software license.
Chris didn't want the attribution clause in open source licenses, was vocal about it. An attribution clause won't get approved by the OSI, so any license with an attribution clause doesn't seem right.
Russ used a Mozilla-based license with some added clauses. Didn't send to OSI for a long time (just getting to the end of the process after having submitting 9 months ago). Social Text also likes the idea of attribution, not for everything but for if the software gets forked. Russ (and Social Text) backed off from calling themselves open source until they had gotten OSI approval for their license.
Brian talks about one of the original BSD licenses developed at UC Berkeley which says you have to include information about the source of the code. They moved away from the attribution clause because it just wasn't possible to do correct attribution, especially if someone like RedHat was shipping hundreds of open source products under one umbrella.
Attribution is important on another level, where people are contributing because they want to build their name.
Michael talks about how things that happen in Red Hat tie into his position the OSI. Sometimes percieved as a conflict, but the joint work actually works out very well because he's seeing how the theoretical mixes with the real world. The definition on Wikipedia is one of the most hotly debated topic, and has to be regularly monitored to keep clean.
Posted by mike at July 25, 2007 11:42 AM
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