Management 'Scared' by Open Source 373
A discussion panel at EclipseCon exposed how managers are freaking out over open source. Apparently a disconnect exists between managers who set corporate open source policies and developers supposed to follow them, but who end up covering their tracks to make it seem like they are not using open source. Developers, though, end up using open source because of its ubiquity and not using it 'puts them at a competitive disadvantage because their competitors are.' And the Lawyers are in a panic.
The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
Many managers don't realize that just "using" Spring does NOT force you to open up your systems.
You only need to open up if and when you modify Spring framework with your own code.
2) Open source hacks is another fear they have: the fear that somehow using open source tools will make their client sue them.
3) Leak Back: Managers fear developers, in their zeal to promote open source, will incorporate company's code into open source for 'benefitting' others. Much like SCO claimed. Developers are not fools.
It requires a maturity level beyond that exists today and i don't blame them since these managers were brought up an era where you pay good money for good things.
Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
Tom
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Developers are not legal experts either. "Who retains what rights to which code" can become a sufficiently complicated question without bringing the umpteen F/OSS licenses out there into the mix. If the developers can duplicate what already exists in F/OSSland for less money than the legal team c
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Nice one, Bill (Score:4, Interesting)
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Managers are under the mistaken impression that if i just use spring or Jakarta Commons, the company MUST open up the whole project in which it is used (like a proprietrary trading system) to Open Source.
Use how? What if one of the engineers needs a snippet of code, copies it from Spring, and incorporates it into their product without attribution? Suddenly, that company is legally vulnerable.
You only need to open up if and when you modify Spring framework with your own code
No, that is not correc
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Oh, come on! The dev community has worked twenty years to get to the point where you can reuse existing code without having to copy and paste it. We were calling this inheritance if I'm not mistaken.
Also, it's common sense that other people's code is other people's. If your developers are not intelligent enough t
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Using an open source tool and modifying it are two deeply different things.
Not while "linking" and "modifying" remain synonymous, they're not.
Added to which, the GPL - probably the most popular OSS license - does not require "modification" to apply its restrictions, it merely requires "inclusion".
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Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
No matter what the size, it doesn't "trigger the GPL".
Lets say I have written an identical two liner and published it, but without GPL, so nobody is allowed to duplicate it. What's the difference between including your code and mine? Each one is copyright infringement and treated identically. The only difference is that the person copying your code has one more way to make his copying legal (by publishing everything under GPL) which someone who copies my code doesn't have. But nobody can ever be forced to publish their code under the GPL.
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One category of programs that may cause such issues are lexical and syntactical analyzers (also known as lexer and parser generators), since they often include parts of themselves in their output.
Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
Got any examples?
The most common lex and yacc tools distributed with Linux are Flex and Bison - or at least they were when last I had occasion to use such things. It's not true in either of those cases.
Flex, if you look at its sourceforge page [sourceforge.net] is distributed under the BSD licence. So there are no problems with flex.
Bison is more problematical, since it's released under the full GPL. The problem is acknowledged by the FSF [gnu.org]
However the same FAQ entry continues:
So Bison isn't a threat either.
Which tools were you thinking of, specifically? I'm sure the authors of such tools don't intend to lay traps for proprietary developers, and I expect they'd be happy to make the relevant changes if it meant wider use of their tools.
Failing that, it would be a worthwhile exercise to publicise any such tools that are incompatible with proprietary development processes. As opposed to just going "Open Source! Be Very Afraid!" which doesn't seem to contribute anything of value to the debate
NMAP (Score:3, Informative)
No FOSS tool that I know of limits what you can do with its output.
NMAP [insecure.org] does.
Try integrating NMAP with yoru commercial product. You won't be allowed to distirbute it if you use it's output to integrate into your own stuff.
Check out their wacky addition to the GPL:
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Please don't be obtuse. The parent poster was referring to running the program at development time, then incorporating its result as part of the product. The restriction you cite does not forbid that.
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Are you sure? Because it seems to me that you would have a tougher row to hoe to get a court to agree that they are forced to use the terms of the GPL itself rather than the terms that they explicitly laid out for their product.
Are their terms 90% GPL? Yes. Did they add/modify/clarify (depending on your view) a term? Also yes. What makes you
Educational campaigns are needed. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Use how? What if one of the engineers needs a snippet of code, copies it from Spring, and incorporates it into their product without attribution? Suddenly, that company is legally vulnerable.
That's basically a non-issue, because those "snippets of code" are out there and readily available to your developers whether your organization actually uses the software or not. You might as well argue that they shouldn't have access to any programming manuals, because they might appropriate some of the (copyrighted) example code.
Open source licenses are more permissive than those for proprietary software in all respects that I can think of, including distribution. But no, you can't simply modify it and s
Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
This is a valid concern, but it goes deeper than you think. It's been a few years since I programmed for Win32 and MFC, but back then, it was quite common for Windows programmer to google for hacks^H^H^H^H^H solutions to problems or copy code from book CDs to solve problems and to cut and paste them into code. In web programming, it's even more common to look for libraries or snippets that solve a problem rather than reinvent the wheel.
Years of blindly clicking book-long EULAs or online EULAs that change silently on you without your notice have taught people that licenses don't matter and are things to be ignored. Most developers who do this don't seem to be aware of licensing issue and assume that if it's on the internet or if it came with or on a book, then it must be public domain and fair game. In a large number of case, this is not the case, and a stricter license ("you may use this code in non commercial code" or "you may use this code but not modify it" or even "this code is for demonstration purposes only, do not use it") is attached. Shared source muddles the issue further since it leaves you to SCO-like "you looked at the code so anything you write is contaminated" type lawsuits.
This is what managers are really afraid of.
What many managers haven't clued in on is that open source makes managing this concern easier because most open source software falls into 10 or so licenses that can be divided into three or so categories "share quid pro quo" (e.g. GPL), "library quid pro quo alike" (e.g. LGPL), "attribution" (e.g. BSD, MIT). So it should be easy to define a policy for them and provide a mechanism for new licenses to be added. If you enforce the policy to make your developers actually *look* at the license and *care*, there's little reason to fear and reason to be more confident than you aren't accidentally setting yourself for IP lawsuits from *non-open source* publishers since your developers will be avoiding those like the plague in favour of open source software of the appropriate type.
disempowerment (Score:5, Interesting)
Free software is also not advertised unlike commercial products, which means that managers can't even communciate, what is going on, to their kin.
Compare: "I recently negotiated a licencing deal with <known software company> for <known software product>, which i deemed to be the best solution because of <list of buzzwords>"
To: "Well, my IT guys implemented a working system on their own, using some software I can't pronounce and really don't understand."
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And besides - if you really must see me as an evil person - the power to refuse somebody something is not much of a thrill. Comparing to the simple fact I can just fire him...
1995 called-they want their obsolete managers back (Score:3, Insightful)
"I believe that another important fear is that of disempowerment. Open source is usually free of charge, which means that their budgets and thus their importance decreases."
How many of us read this, and are saying "Hey, if they're worried about the consequences of reduced budgets, they can always throw me another $50k a year ..."? :-)
Its not about budgets, and its not about power - its about managers who aren't really right for the job - because the JOB has changed.
Look at it this way - 1st-rate peo
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The main reason is the lack of knowledge. Period. (At least for the companies that I've worked for.)
The people who makes these decisions are frequently ex-techies who don't realize that they have no useful knowledge anymore, simply because they've been living in management-land for so long. So they make decision based on simple rules. Back in the '80's, the rule was "no one got fired for going with IBM." Now, it's "no one got fired for going Microsoft."
Time and time again, they choose to pay for ov
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I use openoffice all of the time - and the answer to your question is "open office is only an acceptable replacement for basic users of office applications" - have you tried opening a complex spreadsheet in openoffice ? it'll take ages. On my 3 year old windows laptop similar spreadsheets open in 20% of the time in Excel.
Openoffice is very good - but for a small % of users it is a v
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I use openoffice all of the time - and the answer to your question is "open office is only an acceptable replacement for basic users of office applications" - have you tried opening a complex spreadsheet in openoffice? it'll take ages. On my 3 year old windows laptop similar spreadsheets open in 20% of the time in Excel.
Yup. Just did it. Opened quicker than Excel for me.
Openoffice is very good - but for a small % of users it is a very poor replacement, 75$ is also a bargain for MS Office.
I would a
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Please see my comment at http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225968&c id=18299300 [slashdot.org]. I would submit that anyone who does even simple graphing in Excel is not a candidate for Open Office. Given that Office is predominantly a business application, and given that Excel is the primary component for business users, I think this means that Open Office is simply unsuited for business users.
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Looking at your post, why are you using a spreadsheet to do that kind of graphing in the first place (even Excel)? You seem to be claiming that your particular use of spreadsheets shows that OO.org is not suitable for all business use, even though you are using it in a way that is non-representative of typical business use cases.
Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
I regularly generate reasonably complex CSV files with *nix tools, usually out of prof, truss, dtrace or syslog output. A couple of quick clicks in excel, up pops a graph which contains useful visual information. Why, just the other day I solved a multi-process race condition with a floating bar chart derived from a log file...
Excel is really great for that sort of stuff, lots of built-in graph types you can quickly try, it understands things like dates and floats, and if you wind up with something really cool you can take a few more minutes to add some labels and colours and bang it into a PDF.
Compared to what.. What other tool allow that? Hmm. I'm thinking here. Whatever tool that might be, it sure as hell isn't installed on my desktop and I don't know how to use it.
So, in your magic neverland where Excel is not the right solution.. What is? And why should I spend time+money on it, when Excel already does what I want it to?
(And, for the record, I use Excel '97...)
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Yes.
"it'll take ages"
False.
"On my 3 year old windows laptop similar spreadsheets open in 20% of the time in Excel."
False again.
You probably meant that open *Excel* spreadsheets on Openoffice.org took ages; that I admit. But open *openoffice* spreadsheets on Openoffice.org works just OK. On the other hand, trying to open Openoffice.org spreadsheets on Excel doesn't take ages: it takes forever.
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Here's a clear reason. Open Office is a toy. I am actually not a power user of Excel, but every time I try Open Office Calc (spreadsheet) it is very disappointing. Just the other day I wanted to graph 2048 data pairs contained in a CSV file. I am using a dual core machine with 2GB of RAM, and nothing else is running. In Open Office's spreadsheet program it takes 15 seconds just to
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I am not an excel user nor am I tied to a UI scheme. I am a frequent game player (each UI unique with different levels of quality) and also commonly use various new open source tools (again, many have unique UI's of various quality levels). I can truly say that I have never seen anything quite so horrid as the user interface in 2007. It took a full 10 seconds just to figur
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Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:4, Informative)
I use the OO apps every day on my machines. They are pretty good, the price is right, and I prefer to avoid the MS tax where possible. I also think MS Word sucks because it tries to do WAY too much for me (turn off all that crap, and just let me write!), and I think Excel 3 was the best version (very nice but still lean).
Yet, in most recent software company I co-founded and served as CTO (building self-service web apps), we made a decision to use MS Office instead.
Why? Compatibility. The business-side partners, while sympathetic to the open source cause, and certainly liking the price, were emphatic that they needed to frequently exchange files with suppliers and customers. I would have liked to make the case for OO, but I could easily find files in Word, Excel and PowerPoint that OO would fail to properly display or edit. So, with these inconvenient facts, I agreed that MS Office was the way to go.
Am I disgusted with MS practices in making compatibility so difficult? Absolutely. But I still needed to make decisions based on the actual facts on the ground, not the ideal that OO will (someday) be fully compatible. We had a company to build and needed the best, most cost-effective tools to get the work done, even if we are being oppressed by a monopoly compatiility issue.
A few years later, my current startup is in development and fabrication of high-performance composite products. We are starting out with OO, and compatibility is better, and MS Office is even more bloated, but I have a suspicion that the same decision will ultimately be made again.
Either way, neither decision will have been made from ignorance, and certainly not from any kind of "nobody got fired for buying XYZ" attitude.
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To be fair, I don't expect a manager beyond a certain level to understand the complexities of libraries and linking and 'derived work' and patent clauses or whatnot. In particular not if they're entering into a legal agreement on the company's behalf, which is exactly what a software license is. I certai
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It doesn't help that they have salespeople from BlackDuck Software [blackducksoftware.com] reinforcing their fears. Theys guys come knocking telling CEOs, and CFOs (they're very careful not to make initial contact with the technical g
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Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you use any open source code in your company's software, your failure to comply with the legal conditions for doing so (such as the GPL) can and will put you in close communication with your lawyers if the original coder ever finds out you've ripped his code in secret."
The good news is that policy from the highest levels at the free software foundation is "never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance." So if a manager finds that they are noncompliant, they will get guidance (from Moglen) about how to get back into compliance, rather than a lawsuit.
On the whole, it seems like a much friendlier proposition that having a team of attorneys crawl over every vendor's EULA with a microscope.
Re:The main reason is lack of clear knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
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That might be why MySQL also offers commercial licenses, which presubaly do not carry any such requirements.
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Yes, it is. It wouldn't be a "mistaken impression" if source code added *new* legal problems, but the case is that it doesn't add new problems at all, so they shouldn't be more scared about the GPL than they are about Microsoft's CLUF, for instance. There lies the "mistaken impression".
"What if I downloaded Spring, renamed it and sold it to my client as my own work? I would be in trouble."
Of course you could be in tr
Heard that (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like a fiver you leave on a bus for anyone to have, people are always skeptical if they can in fact take it.
On the plus side, it's fun explaining the public domain to folk
Tom
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I think I understand their concern. Technically you still have copyright over your works, as copyright is automatic, but it's what you do with that copyright subsequently that makes it de-facto public domain work.
Also, it's not strictly true that you're passing it on without licence - you are entering into a verbal contract with your clients (which I believe is binding in most legal systems, but don't quote me on that) which gives them certain rights over your copyrighted work. A good lawyer would proba
Re:Heard that (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually *sold* a few of licenses to the public domain SQLite [sqlite.org] library. Companies call me up and say they want to license the product. I carefully explain that no license is necessary and that they can use it forever for free for anything they want. But they still want a license. So I sell them one. So far, I've sold them cheap. Maybe I should charge more....
This appears to be more of an issue in Europe where, apparently, the concept of "public domain" is less well defined than in the US.
This makes perfect sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
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And then there's the guy in IT who uses the phrase "public domain" for things that are open sourced, licensed with sources, published in textbooks, or anywhere in between. Even if he knows the difference, he's poisoning the well by callously disregarding the important distinction of "the owner makes the source available" and "the source has no owner."
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It helps to have a consistent coding style, makes my code easy to argue that it came from one source.
Tom
Gifted Peasant (got) Lawyer (Score:2, Funny)
In Soviet Russia KGB scared about not stealing enough code for you.
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You capitalist pig.
The license issues (Score:5, Insightful)
And for good reason. Just listening to all the talk on whether or not Novell is violating GPL (perhaps by simply partnering with another vendor - Microsoft) should make a lawyer's skin crawl...
If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption.
So, GPL was used to wrestle a few vendors into releasing their own code. And what? Who has looked into that code or used it for anything else? And how many other vendors have (foolishly) decided to avoid "open source" and come up with their own (usually inferior) re-inventions of the wheel, because of that?
It is hard enough to use an outside solution because of the NIH [wikipedia.org] syndrome. Restrictive licenses exacerbate the problem...
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I'm sorry. What did you just write? Give me one example of a company being forced to release previously proprietary software under the GNU GPL. One. I dare you.
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Do a Google search [google.com] will ya?
How about Cisco [infoworld.com] for example, uhm? Or Linksys [wi-fiplanet.com]:
Re:The license issues (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of people benefiting from this actually.
Ever heard of http://www.hyperwrt.org/ [hyperwrt.org] and http://openwrt.org/ [openwrt.org] ?
Now you can actually run a webserver on this device.
Granted, you can create a discussion about the commercial value of it all, but it certainly has a very high educational value. Also, this code (with some modifications) could be used on other/similar devices as well.
The way I see it, this is a big win. Instead of reinventing the wheel people can now start off with the already existing code. And I bet Linksys is actually selling more devices because of openwrt instead of less, so Linksys has won too.
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I'd say it could have a lot of commercial value. After all, the WRT54 series is recommended all over the 'net just because of the moddability of the product and the community around those mods. This could certainly bring in more sales.
Re:The license issues (Score:4, Interesting)
How is that semantics? I thought that was the whole point - PHB's are afraid of having to release all or part of their precious proprietary software. But that's not what happened with Linksys/Cisco and the WRT54G routers. It was a striped down Linux distro. Ok, they had to put it together, perhaps write some shell scripts. I'm not sure where the web interface came from. But did they have to release any super-secret proprietary source code? I doubt it.
So really, has there been any actual cases of a manager's worst nightmare, the scenario that Microsoft has been FUD'ing us with for years - having to "open source" their internally developed software because a developer in some way used Open Source Software? That's what I'm after. And I don't believe it's ever happened. It's just FUD but the managers don't know any better.
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Well, if that's all it was, why is OpenWRT [openwrt.org] offered as an example by another responder to my post? Apparently, some work was required to go from a "Linux distro" to "Linksys firmware" — and that work is now available to all because of GPL.
And I'm not saying, it is bad. But it certainly is something, a "PHB" is justified to be concerned about.
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Yeah, but so what? Do you think that the PHB somehow doesn't have to be concerned about the alternative, which is either licensing some proprietary solution (which, legally, is probably even more complicated to deal with) or writing it in-house from scratch (which, obviously, would be complicated too).
In other words, there's going to be issues (licensing or otherwise) whether OSS is used or not, and I've yet to find any situation wh
Re:The license issues (Score:5, Informative)
Just off the top of my head, it's been a while.
They took the Linux kernel and patched to support a Broadcom wireless NIC. They then sold the compiled version as their own software. Someone found a bug in the interface that dropped them into a shell and discovered it was Linux. Linksys responded by offering the Linux kernel source without the patch. People complained when it didn't work and legal again was threatened. So Linksys rewrote the patch to use a binary blob. Nothing proprietary was lost.
Open Source developers then used the patch and blob to reverse engineer a Broadcom driver for BSD, and latter, Linux.
My memory of the events is hazy. I'm sure there is a Wiki article somewhere with more/better details.
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How about owners being able to modify their router firmware? There are _LOTS_ of mods for the WRT54G mainly because of this and the WRT54G enjoys part of its sales because it is so flexible.
Hell. I have a modded one on my office.
So, I am one who benefited from this.
You can take my garbage. Tuesdays.
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Interesting. So, now I aware of the benefits — in this case. Cool.
I can, of course, but I don't have to. Unlike the poster who dared me to come with an example of something, I simply said, I'm unaware of something (else) — and you informed me...
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ALL code licenses are "just semantics", because all laws are "just semantics". Many companies have taken F/OSS code and pretended that they had the right to make it their own and were stopped by the legal copyright owners from doing so. They were in fact maki
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Although such cases likely exist, I don't have to present them here, because I have not spoken of them. The case of Linksys being arm-twisted into releasing their code illustrates my point (not the GGP's apparent interpretation).
That the arm-twisting may have benefited Linksys itself overall (as was
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Stop spreading FUD. Novell was doing more than simply partnering with Microsoft. They took out what amounted to a patent license in all but words, which would call into question their ability to distribute GPL code. The patent clause in the GPL is quite clear: if you have a patent license to code under the GPL, you must be able to transfer that license along with the code, or y
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Whether Novell was right or wrong, the truth remains — they had GPL-related troubles (and may have them again). Had they used BSD-licensed wares, they wouldn't have had these troubles. End of story.
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They also wouldn't have had a marketable product. If you decide to distribute GPL code then you have to play by the rules. End of story.
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Come, come... Certainly, you are not saying, that Apple's FreeBSD-derived MacOS is less marketable, than Novell's Linux-derived SUSE (or whatever)...
Yes, of course — true of any license (and decision). The point is about the rules being too restrictive for some people.
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The marketable bits of OSX are the bits that are proprietary. Seeing as Apple have (more or less) kept Darwin open then they could have just as well have used a GPL'd kernel (like Apple's own mkLinux).
If Novell released NovellBSD, they certainly wouldn't be putting some slick propeietary UI on top of FreeBSD. Without that, why would you buy it? There's certainly nothing stop
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I'm not comparing GPL'd vs. proprietry software. I'm contrasting GPL with BSD-license — the latter being far less restrictive.
Tell me now, how is Apple's MacOS "at the
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Novell bought GPL developed projects. To turn around later and blame the GPL for Novell's PR nightmare is stupid. There exists something called 'due diligence'.
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If more code was released under BSD-type licenses, we would see a lot of proprietary software using such software and small contributions to the original, BSD licensed code, only where compatibility between the BSD core and their proprietary extensions is required.
GPL-style is an economic incentive for corporations to act nice (help others or don't sell your "enhanced" version). BSD is no such thing.
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^^^^
Preview is for sissies.
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GPL is more of legal incentive, than an economic one... Hence the lawyers' worries...
Yep. BSD is not an enforcement tool.
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open source is exactly what? (Score:3, Informative)
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Speaking of nobody (Score:2)
"We have never, in the history of free software, despite everything that has been said by lawyers and flaks and propagandists on the other side - we have never forced anybody to free any code."
http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen [geof.net]
Strange conceptions indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand the leaking of GPL code is a reasonable concern. It happens all to often with common software such as MySQL. And you here statements such as "but if we use Perl, we are not linking against the MySQL code", which are dubious at best. Or "if the customer downloads the library himself, we are not responsible".
Of course banning open source is not the solution. Actually most commercial software packages have some content of open source code (Windows has the BSD network stack, Matlab has BLAS, Adobe uses the JPEG library...). And even if you ban all open source software, you can still violate the license of a commercial package
Commercial Licences (Score:3, Insightful)
Which a point rarely made about proprietary software. Practically every piece of proprietary code comes with a different license, with an entirely different set of restrictions. It's a lot easier to make a misstep with proprietary software than it is with open source, and your risk of being taken to court (as opposed to just some public shame restricted to tech circles) is far higher.
Of course they're scared (Score:3, Insightful)
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In my experience managers can actually be educated quite fast/well on open source if you know how to sell it to them. The main keywords are 'cost savings', 'reliability', 'significantly less downtime', 'scalability', 'flexibility', 'performance'.
And big company's like Novell, IBM and RedHat selling opensource/linux make a very strong case.
Actually, in my experience
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Richard Stallman is against the existence of commercial software, and he gives very good reasons for why he thinks it is bad for society. But I'm not sure he is against the existence of commercial software businesses. He probably just sees them as a waste of time i.e spending time and money to produce something that will ultimately be rest
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Richard Stallman is against the existence of commercial software, and he gives very good reasons for why he thinks it is bad for society. But I'm not sure he is against the existence of commercial software businesses.
Splitting hairs, I'd say - in any case, I think we agree that it's hard to reconcile "commercial software should not exist" with "I want to sell commercial software." As to 'judging the code on its merits,' I wouldn't want to buy from someone who didn't want me as a customer, even if the price were zero. If nothing else, I'd worry that they would be less likely to accept patches, fix bugs that were important to me, interact on mailing lists, and in general provide support. It's not necessarily a deal b
Shill (Score:2)
2 : to act as a spokesperson or promoter
That still implies payment. Look at every definition returned from a Google define query [google.co.uk] - each one implies payment.
FUD (Score:2, Interesting)
If the company policy is closed source that is it. Managers are absolutely right to make sure that nobody uses open source in company products, because if somebody sneaks in snippets of GPL-protected code into their applications, that might have big legal ramifications.
Said that, the company policy to use open source in their productsor not is another issue. That is up to particular company, particular circumstances. For som
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There are lots of places where you can legally use open source and Free software in a closed source environment. To cut that out of your arsenal is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Of course it depends on the license and what you are willing to give up. But as previous posters have said, you can use public domain software anywhere. You can use BSD licensed software almost everywhere as long as you don't mind tellin
Best Buy (Score:3, Interesting)
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WTF then is the problem with FOSS? At least it would have made what they were doing legal. Or do they WANT to be criminal scum?
Truth (Score:2, Insightful)
People make money by adding value to others.
Resistance Is Futile (Score:2)
developers within a company shipping a product should be trained in what you can and cannot use and under what circumstances. Soon here even java will be open source, so you will not even be running your application servers and custom code without a open source component.
What we are talking about here is propriet
Scene One: Staff Meeting (Score:3, Funny)
Coder #1: Yeah, I think it's cool that—
Manager: AIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
[Manager faints.]
Coder #2: That's the last project on SourceForge that we hadn't used yet. How are we going to get out of work tomorrow?
Coder #1: Hmm... Wanna go grab a beer and start yet another Python web framework?
Coder #2: You're a genius.
Broad generalizations are always so useful (Score:2, Insightful)
In a manager's budget, developers time are free (Score:2, Interesting)
See the problem here? Using open source give an advantage in the minds of the developers, but not the managers? Why? Because developers' time are free for managers of most in-house IT dept! Developers' salary is fixed cost in the budget, once hired, a manager rarely have to justify it every year. On the contrary, developers viewed as having little
It seems that the managers are not managing (Score:2)
Is this any different from educating employees ... (Score:2)
One would think that if corporations have no difficulty "educating" employees on interpersonal relationships or export legal issues, that they would have someone from legal get up to speed on the various types of open source licensing and "educate" the managers and developers on the subject, and when it is required to include attribution comments (why not do that ALWAYS? Seems like it would improve the documentation).
I suppose this is what keeps the
Proprietary software frightens *me* (Score:3, Insightful)
Just another successful Microsoft FUD campaign? (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire scox-scam is nothing but a small part of msft's ongoing fud campain. The entire scam will cost msft well under $100M - pocket change for msft.
Now that the scox-scam is winding down, msft has bought a new bitch - Novell.
Msft message to corrupt users is crystal clear: "F/OSS is a legal mine-field. If you even use linux you risk a lawsuit. If you substantially contribute to linux a lawsuit is nearly inevitable. If you even think about touching a F/OSS produce, you will be legally forced to open all of code." Msft has pounded on that message for years and years. Lots of msft shills scream hystical warnings, all kinds of fake lawsuits, fake studies from msft owned "think tanks" and so on.
I think msft's fud campaign has been smart, and successful.
Re:managers who set corporate open source policies (Score:2)