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But Muth said the term "open source" has a variety of meanings, and the company's definition differs from the one used to describe Unix and the increasingly popular Linux - in which a worldwide community of developers are able to freely extend, modify and commercialize versions of the software.

• The check is in the mail.
• I won't come in your mouth
• "I did not have sexual relations with that woman!"
• Our "open source" is different than your "open source", but we are still "open source"

www.OpenSource.org

Although this isn't the kind of thing one normally associates with the charged word "discrimination," it does violate clause 5, the rationale for which states "we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process."

It's not clear to me that a political campaign can satisfy this clause and still stay within the laws governing political campaign contributions. It might be interesting for the OSI to list types of projects that are unable to satisfy the OSD due to conflicting legal obligations...

You can contact the right people at mark-misuse@opensource.org.

I remember thinking of schemes like this when I first came across the idea of Free Software. I've been thinking about it ever since (about 14 years) and have concluded that they won't work. Given that I make my living out of supporting Free Software, this is not simply an intellectual exercise for me.

The problem is that people are generally not motivated to write good software by money. There is quite a body of evidence that offering monetary incentives to programmers tends to reduce quality, as the programmers start putting effort into working the system, rather than coding. Obviously, people are paid to code, but the money is rarely the direct motivation for doing a good job.

He does touch on one of the primary motivations for commercial programmers contributing to Free Software, which is that it is often cheaper to add the features you want to an existing Free program, than to write, or buy something else.

Anyway, an interesting article, but it's fundamentally flawed in its assumption that COSS falls under the wing of Free Software.

Clause 6 of the DFSG (a.k.a. OSD) prohibits licenses that discriminate against specific fields of endeavour (such as making money, for example).

Even if that were not the case, DFSG compliant licenses must allow derived works (clause 2) which would mean that you could derive a work which differed only in the person to whom the money should be sent, which would instantly destroy the structure he's trying to build.

His ideas also seem to fall foul of the fact that you can do what the hell you like with legally obtained software, so the ``are you using it enough to pay for it ?'' stuff might be interesting to enforce, and certainly wouldn't result in a DFSG license.

On the subject of allocating points, I'd be stunned if anyone could come up with a scheme that would appropriately reward someone that spends six months tracking down an obscure (but serious) bug (say an intermittent networking bug).

Say you allocate 5 points (it's only bug fix, after all) and the contributor says ``that's not enough, I spent six months finding that bug!'' --- You end up with all the silliness of having to do a clean-room reimplementation of the fix ? Oh dear, oh dear.

In the end, Open Source (according to the Open Source Definition) is Free Software. But the point of the Open Source movement was not to scare people off with the ideas of freedom and give them something else they will be more likely to accept. So, in definition, the Open Source Software is Free Software, but in many person's minds it is a different thing. The Open Source movement has managed people to go "open source", but the cost is that it, as I said in my other message, has hidden the Important Thing from many persons. Open Source is Free Software according to its definition, but that's not in many persons minds.

Read The Technie/Hacker's Case for Open Source:

The real reason for the re-labeling [of Free Software] is a marketing one. We're trying to pitch our concept to the corporate world now. We have a winning product, but our positioning, in the past, has been awful. The term ``free software'' has a load of fatal baggage; to a businessperson, it's too redolent of fanaticism and flakiness and strident anti-commercialism.

[...] In marketing appearance is reality. The appearance that we're willing to climb down off the barricades and work with the corporate world counts for as much as the reality of our behavior, our convictions, and our software.

The reason is marketing. Lets hide the freedom from them. That's not good.

Alejo.

Just providing or publishing source code does not make an application Open Source.

fool /n./

As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin, loser, fool file, the.

~from the Jargon File, assembled by Eric Raymond

But the real reason for the re-labeling is a marketing one. We're trying to pitch our concept to the corporate world now. We have a winning product, but our positioning, in the past, has been awful. The term ``free software'' has a load of fatal baggage; to a businessperson, it's too redolent of fanaticism and flakiness and strident anti-commercialism.

Mainstream corporate CEOs and CTOs will never buy ``free software'', manifestos and clenched fists and all. But if we take the very same tradition, the same people, and the same free-software licenses and change the label to ``open source'' - that, they'll buy.

~from the Hacker's Case for Open Source

I'm a little confused by this:

SPI still owns the Open Source trademark. Ask the USPTO.

(I'm assuming that you're referring to the United States Patent and Trademark Office?...I've never actually heard of such a place (what being Canadian), but it's the only expansion that made sense in this context :)

I was under the impression that you (Bruce) had handed over ownership of the trademark to Eric. On the front page of the opensource.org website, there's the following paragraph:

---
The phrase `open source' has been registered as a certification mark. You can examine the Open Source Definition that sets the conditions for use of this mark. You can read about software that qualifies and our branding program.
---

Yet on this page of the SPI website, it appears that the trademark ownership is still in dispute.

Should the resolution of this dispute be of fairly high priority? I mean, yeah, the APSL is being disputed, but if it -weren't- being disputed, would Eric be able to officially dub it "open source" if the OSI doesn't own/control the trademark?

Why hasn't this been resolved? The SPI page is dated Nov 24 1998. What's the current status of the dispute? Who is actually officially and legally in control of the mark?

- deb

Don't read this, my logic is probably flawed. :)

The whole point of Linux is open source. Meaning that peoples ideas are shared freely, which is pretty much the opposite of IP, afaik. And, all OS-wars aside, Linux is obviously not dead. The system works, and the reason people add to the collective pool of knowledge (embodied in source code) is simply because they want to see the system do a certain thing. I'm pretty sure thats why most (probably close to all) GPL'd packages are created to begin with.

And the Linux phenomenon is so much fun because it WORKS. Even Linux's competitors admit this.
--
Paranoid

Bruce

The Apple Public Source License - Our Concerns Bruce Perens , Primary Author: The Open Source Definition. Co-Founder: The Open Source Initiative.
Wichert Akkerman: Debian Project Leader.
Ian Jackson: President, Software in the Public Interest. Author, Debian package installation tool `dpkg'.

We welcome Apple Computer, Inc. as a participant in the Free Software Community. We feel that a few problems in the present version of the Apple Public Source License (the APSL) disqualify it as "Open Source(TM)" or "Free Software". We hope that Apple can address these issues to everyone's satisfaction.

The participation of companies like Apple and IBM should be considered in the same way as the participation of any free software developer. Everyone is welcome to make a contribution. Individually, we each decide whether or not to accept a particular developer's contribution, for reasons that range from technical to legal and licensing concerns. We openly discuss these issues before our community, often quite harshly, as a means of developing consensus and charting our course. One consensus that we've reached is the Open Source Definition, a generally accepted definition of Free Software licensing, written by Bruce Perens and the Debian GNU/Linux developers in 1997.

We note that much of the material that Apple has just released under the APSL originated at The University of California, Berkeley and at Carnegie-Mellon University. That work was sponsored by the U.S. Government, paid for with our taxes, and was already available as Free Software under the BSD license and other well-accepted Open Source licenses. Many of these files do not significantly differ from the pre-Apple versions except that they bear the addition of a new copyright and license. Other files are entirely authored by Apple or bear significant modifications that should indeed be considered Apple's property. Where Apple has not significantly modified individual files from their pre-Apple versions, their original licenses should be preserved without the addition of the APSL.

Section 2.2(c) of the APSL requires that the producer of modifications to APSL-licensed code use a particular URL in the Apple.com domain to notify Apple. While the demise of Apple Computer, Inc. is unlikely in the near future, that sad event would leave us unable to comply with this section of the APSL. This would constitute a restriction on all rights granted by the license, including those rights necessary to qualify under the Open Source Definition. The Free Software community plans a very long lifetime for its software, and we hope that Apple will cooperate by changing this provision so that APSL-licensed software could survive without Apple. We suggest that the simple publication of modifications, such as posting on a personal web site accessible to the global internet and pointed out in any binary distributions, be all that is required. This is consistent with other licenses in our community.

Section 9.1 of the APSL allows Apple to terminate our rights to use any or all APSL-covered code, at its sole discretion, in the event of an unproven claim of infringement, no matter how specious. This is derived from a similar objectionable portion of IBM's Jikes license, which disqualified that license from being referred to as "Open Source". We hope that Apple will consider the investment that members of the Free Software community will put into APSL-licensed code when they write modifications for it. An arbitrary termination could cause us to suddenly lose that investment at some future date, with no chance for appeal. The licenses accepted by our community do not provide the possibility of termination in this manner. If termination due to an infringement claim is to be allowed at all, it should be explicitly limited to the particular source-code lines that are considered to infringe upon an existing patent. This would make it possible for the free software community to "write around the problem" and create a non-infringing version. The authors of the APSL apparently did not consider that patents expire. It should be possible for us to store infringing code for restoral to use upon the expiration of the patent in question. Apple might also consider if it's possible to allow third-parties to defend the disputed code from an infringement claim that would cause us all to lose our rights under the APSL.

We also regret to note that that Eric Raymond, with the best of intentions, jumped a little too fast to embrace the APSL in his enthusiasm to welcome Apple to our community. He placed the Open Source designation on a license that wasn't quite ready for that. We invite Eric and other members of the Free Software community to join us in requesting the few simple changes to the APSL that we have outlined in this letter.

Contact: Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> 510-526-1165 (USA) Links to Relevant Information

• The Open Source Definition.
• The Debian Free Software Guidelines, from which the Open Source Definition is derived.
• Is Your Software In Danger of Termination, an open letter on the topic of license termination.
• Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd Distribution.
• Software in the Public Interest.

Like it or not, Apple published its source code. This makes it open source regardless of whether or not you lie the license, whether or not you like the Mac, or whether or not you like Apple.

Availability of source code alone does not make a program Open Source. In order to be able to use the Open Source mark, Apple must make its license compatible with certain guidelines. See the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the Open Source Definition for details.

The Open Source mark is registered to Software in the Public Interest, and ultimately the SPI board will decide whether or not Apple is permitted to use it.

> If you use an MP3 player, which is it?

mpg123 -s foo.mp3 | aplay -m &

ac
--
OSS != OSS.

O'Reilly completely ignores the OSD to put his own definition on Open Source. Eric Raymond stands by, letting it happen.

Bruce Perens

Effugas wrote:

While the original developer retains the right to use his own code in closed source software, I do not believe that he(or she) may use submitted code in that software--at least not under the GPL license.

Technically, you're right, but to a certain extent it depends on the project. If a person submits code to a software project that is distributed under a particular license, it is traditionally assumed that the submission is also under that license (unless explicitly otherwise). The only person who can change the license on code is the copyright holder. Small patches contributed to a larger work are often considered as being copyright assigned to the holder of the large work by default. Most big projects which care about copyright (eg. GNU or CygWin) ask for a formal assignment of copyright when you submit a significant amount of code. When you assign your copyrights to someone else, they can legally change the license at will.


Sendmail, of course, is not(to my knowledge) covered under GPL, so that probably explains why its makers can use publically submitted patches in a private product.

Until recently, Sendmail was under the BSD License. This license has always been interpreted that you can redistribute BSD source or binaries under any terms (i.e. license) you wish, provided the specific conditions of the BSD license are also met. As of version 8.9, Sendmail, Inc is supporting three versions of Sendmail, each under different license, each license includes the BSD conditions.


An interesting contrast can be drawn with closed source software, which increasingly is including time limits on usage in the fine print. While you can never lose the right to use OSS software, certain popular programs are legally limited to only twenty five to thirty years of usage.

Yeek! Do you have an example of such a license?

It is possible for opensource software to be supported by commercial entities w/o becoming proprietary.

e.g. in http://www.opensource.org/for-suits.html several models are introduced. I think that with IBM, Dell, and compaq now (or soon) offering hardware with Linux installed one bears repeating:

Widget Frosting
In this model, a hardware company (for which software is a necessary adjunct but strictly a cost rather than profit center) goes open-source in order to get better drivers and interface tools cheaper.
.....
The open-source culture's exemplars of commercial success have, so far, been service sellers or loss leaders. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the clearest near-term gains in open-source will be in widget frosting.

If IBM and Compaq switched just one tenth of their AIX and Digital Unix teams to Linux programming, they could contribte immensly....

Not true. Open Source and free software are _exactly_ the same thing. Open Source is just a new name for free software. See http://www.opensource.org.

The "Open Sound System" for Linux is not Open Source, because it doesn't meet the Open Source definition. (And the term Open Source was invented only about a year ago, specifically with this meaning.)

Is it me, or does this CSS patent smell like Microsoft's first shot fired in the war to "de-commoditize protocols" a la the Halloween Document"?

If we (MS) can't keep the protocol closed or the API proprietary, fine; we'll just patent the whole dang concept.

Sheesh.

Jay (=

Linux, like ALL open souce, is about choice. About being able to use [one of] the right tools for the job, and not being locked into something that may be inappropiate for the job, inferior, or simply not to your taste. Generally, competing projects are a Good Thing (see the Halloween Document #1, which points out that competing projects are a strength of open source.

Right now, you have somewhat of a point, although I think a business can justify starting an Open Source package from scratch. See this web page from the Open Source folks.

An easier case to consider is this: Assume that somehow, a large number of Open Source packages have been developed that do almost all of the common things that a business might use. Now you are a business, and you need software to do something. You have several choices:

You can hire a bunch of programmers to develop a package that does exactly what you want to do. This will cost a lot, and have continual update costs

You can buy a "generic" commerical package that does much of what you want to do, but not exactly. This won't cost too much, but you will probably have to continually buy updates as the company stops selling the old software and only sells you new, but slightly incompatible software. You may also have to change around the way your business works in order to mesh with the comerical software, which might make you much less efficent.

You can take the Open Source software that is out there and modify it to do exactly what you want. Of course, you must release these modifications, but your up-front costs are still going to be much lower than building your own, and your long term costs may be much lower than buying a comerical package. Plus, you can make it do what your business wants to do, so you can operate more efficently.

I think that once the Open Source Software reaches a critical mass, you are going to see both comercial companys that create "generic" software, and in-house "closed" development fade away. Really specialized software will probably surive in a closed form for much longer, and I think there will be "software" companies that special in modifying OSS to meet custom needs.

I can see the argument that the government should fund the OSS in order to reach this critical mass and thus provide both businesses and the public with cheaper, higher quality software. In particular, I think the government should strongly consider using OSS for all its internal development. Why should I pay taxes to the gov so it can buy closed source custom software? Why should I pay taxes so that the gov can send lots of money to MicroSoft instead of using Linux or *BSD?

Check out OpenMap(tm) (http://openmap.bbn.com) from BBN. It's all Java and Open Source(tm).

Interestingly, the TIGER data forms the basis for a *lot* of data being sold by big companies. Most street level data of the US is derived from TIGER and then cleaned up/enhanced by those companies.

There was a thread on comp.infosystems.gis a while ago about starting a free data movement. And don't foget, somewhere in the past there was (don't know if it still exists) an "Open Content" movement.

There's a nifty worldwide data set called VMAP (formerly Digital Chart of the World) on 4 CDs available from the USGS.

But back at the ranch, there are some Open Source (tm) mapping systems, none of which handle TIGER as far as I know. In fact, OpenMap(tm) is one that we released just before Christmas. I'd invite the OS community to dive in and write an OpenMap LayerBean that handles TIGER data. OpenMap does handle VMAP but there's always room for improvement...

The Boycott Micro$oft has an ongoing contest for people to suggest things that Microsoft has actually invented. So far, this list includes "Microsoft BOB" and "The Talking Paper Clip".

Microsoft buys, borrows, or steals the innovations of others. (Even their original "cash cow" was bought from someone else.) When this fails to produce the desired results, they will kill the competition by, for instance, integrating the browser into their OS as an "essential feature". Microsoft may also do it with the "embrace and extend" or some of the other things they are trying to do to Linux. Microsoft will even try to quash press reports of their activities.

When the court ordered Microsoft to remove MS Internet Explorer (a name which they misappropriated from someone then eventually bought) from MS Windows, Microsoft broke the OS to do it. During discovery, one of the government's experts provided a way to do it. By the time it came time to demonstrate it in court, Microsoft had changed MS Windows so that it the removal program would no longer work.

But none of this behavior is innovative either. ;-)