Free Software Leadership

GroundBounce writes: "An article at Advogato uses the recent resignation of Christoph Pfister from the Fink project to analyze and highlight the ways in which the free software community often alienates its leaders, and the differences between the Mac shareware and the greater free software communities."

Comments

This isn't a GPL issue, its an ego issue.

[Bowie J. Poag]

Ummmmm, it's already been established that OpenOSX was in no way in violation of the GPL. Cristoph just got his ego bruised when he realised that releasing his code under the GPL does not automatically guarantee that he'll be given credit.

Two problems with this.

1) If he wanted to be given credit for his work that badly, he should have done his homework, and perhaps released his code under a BSD license, which guarantees that he'll be mentioned as the original author. It's not OpenOSX's fault he didn't use his head.

2) If he's in it for the fame and popularity, and not for the idea that the GPL ( and the entire open source movement ) represents, Cristoph should find another line of work -- And apparently, he has.

Cheers,

Re:This isn't a GPL issue, its an ego issue.

[k4m3]

Cristoph just got his ego bruised when he realised that releasing his code under the GPL does not automatically guarantee that he'll be given credit

This is wrong, how many programs from the FSF have you seen whithout the FSF credits ? Let's see some points. Firstly from the GPL-Howto :

Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as "Copyright 1999 Linda Jones"), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).

GPL is not public domain, there is a copyright owner.
Secondly, from the GPL:

1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty[...]

and

2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

given that

0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License.

So the facts are :

• a GPL'd thing as an owner mentionned in the copyright notice
• the notice must remain accross the distribution chain

Re:This isn't a GPL issue, its an ego issue.

[Bowie J. Poag]

If you read the email conversations between Cristoph and OpenOSX, its not the copyright Cristoph is whining about. He's whining about recognition. Right off the bat, that shows you what his priorities are.

Re:About open source and leadership...

[arnwald]

You are getting close,
but in corporate environments they use this military concept of lines.

First you have first line of support : these are the guys that handle all the FAQ & stupid questions & flames and whatnot.

Second line of support : they get questions from the first line of support where you actually have to look at the source code/tables to find out what is going on.

Third line of support : they are the guys that rewrite code if the second line of support has found a new bug.

I kind of cant belief that none of the bigger Open Source projects work like this.

My 0.02 Euro.

Re:Feedback as repayment

[ichimunki]

I always thought that the Free Software philosophy didn't require users to be programmers. On the contrary, I believe Free Software is as much about turning the developers and users into co-owners of software as anything. That is to say, when the business model shifts from the software/content as widget-for-sale model to a relationship model (i.e. support, feature requests, customization, etc), the users end up benefitting from what is *not* a zero sum game. There are very few losers in this plan, except companies like Microsoft whose primary source of revenue is initial license fees (and even they are working hard to make sure that their income doesn't remain dependent on widget sales-- they aren't that stupid).

I think the real problem, so far, has been that most Free Software is not sufficiently user friendly so that a non-programmer can easily install, configure, and use the software. I'd say the last two years, though, have seen great strides in eliminating this complaint. There are a few outstanding areas where some technical know-how is probably more necessary on a Free Software system than on Windows, but that has mostly to do with hardware manufacturers who only produce Windows drivers and only grudgingly (or not at all) work with Linux/BSD types (usually their level of support involves releasing some specs, but not providing a lot of actual assistance-- how many device makers give out the source code to their own drivers to Free developers in an effort to get Free drivers into Linux?).

Re:Feedback as repayment

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

The big secret of Open Source, the one Eric Raymond doesn't want to talk about, is that most users, even of Linux, are not programmers. With that in mind, most of the OSS philosophy is set on its ear.

If only a few of your users are willing to hack on the program a bit, you're still getting advantages. Even if your users aren't keen on hacking, but are able to provide details bug reports, that's a big advantage.

The GNOME, KDE, Apache, and Linux projects seem to be doing well despite most of their users not being programmers.

That also ignores the benefits of OSS for users. A company using OSS can hire someone to make changes they need. Many people can badger friend programmers into making small changes, much like I might badger some of friends into a bit of automobile work.

Most users not being programmers does not set the OSS philosphy on its ear. If no users were programmers, you might have something. And even then, it doesn't change any of the Free Software philosophy (as opposed to Open Source).