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Hall On Worldwide Open Source Movement
adamsmith_uk writes "There's an article up on ZDNet
summarizing an interesting speech from Jon "Maddog" Hall about non-US open-source, as well as protecting open-source from 'looters' - well worth a read: 'The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such, said veteran Linux advocate Jon "Maddog" Hall, in a talk in Birmingham, UK, that emphasized the role of open-source software outside the United States.'"
By its very nature, open source is available for anybody to use. Why would somebody using an open source code be called a 'looter' ?
Not trying to be a troll here, but it just seems to me that if you were to take open sourced software and released it closed source, unless you did it in the US, you would be fine, right? But how can all those VCD Dealers in Malaysia get busted by the Motion Picture Association of AMERICA?
I think the real legal threat to open source is the fact there isn't a huge legal padding fee behind them, hence the Open/Free (yes they are the same) software, no money exchanged.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such
Exactly! And what do you do with international treasure? You bury it away in some dingy, windowless room where no one will ever find it, without an visitors.... to prevent it from getting stolen, y'know.
Hence all OSS developers really need to be locked away in.... uhh ehrmm... oh, NM.
Many IT decision-makers have a herd mentality (e.g. nobody was ever fired for buying Cisco routers). Open Source use passed a critical mass a while ago and enough of the herd is heading in that direction now that the obvious advantages outweigh the fear of the unknown. It's continued acceptance is a foregone conclusion at this point.
outside the U.S.? does he mean Canada? or that other place to the south? Mex Co. something?
F/OSS advocates have to stick together. Divide and conquer still works, lo these many centuries later.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The best protection open source can get is US legal precendents. The defeat of SCO would be a good start, then a decision upholding the GPL so that it gets taken seriously.
This would not only protect OSS, but allay the fears of fence-sitting businessfolk.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I wonder if the use of "looters" is intended to point towards the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.
Casting the Free software movement in the mold of objectivist capitalism might be an interesting thought experiment.
If proprietary software vendors are the "looters" the intellectual efforts of those who can for the sake of those who cannot, it turns a lot of the corporate FUD on its head.
to the "looting" of the Iraqi national museum (at last count, 33 pieces, not tens of thousands), I guess the open source community is pretty safe.
Here is a little quote from the article:
These treasures were created over tens of thousands of years, and all of a sudden, because of the lack of foresight of a few greedy people, a lot of them were removed from the world.(Emphasis added)
How safe is the open source community again?
Hank! White!
It's continued acceptance is a foregone conclusion at this point.
Dear Sir,
Your attempted use of the possessive pronoun "its" is incorrect. Literally, your sentence has the following meaning:
"It is continued acceptance is a forgone conclusion at this point."
Clearly, this does not make any sense. The correct usage is "its", and not "it's". Please remember this for future reference.
Sincerely,
Grammar Nazi
Because open-source software is in the public domain, support was provided by local engineers, creating Brazilian jobs, Hall said.
WTF?!? It's NOT public domain.
Hall seems to know what he's talking about, so I'm going to guess that the article author - Matthew Broersma - did a botch-job in paraphrasing him. Note that this comment isn't actually in quotes, unlike four other comments attributed to Hall.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Anyway, I realize the speech was about something else and this quote was probably selected because of its topical nature (or the reporter's leanings), but the story has been well disproven as a falsehood seized upon by the media in their frenzy to discredit the US and the UK. I'm surprised to see the "thousands and thousands" version of the story, intended to swing public opinion against the Iraq war, still being referenced.
"These treasures were created over tens of thousands of years, and all of a sudden, because of the lack of foresight of a few greedy people, a lot of them were removed from the world," he said. "The world has to decide whether or not to send in troops to guard this free and open-source software, to protect it for the world's use."
Even The Guardian has backed off of the earlier story.
If you want a right-wing source instead of a left-wing source, try WorldNetDaily which was published more than a month before the Guardian one (it helps to use multiple sources).
And even if the original version of the story had been true, I could really care less about some museum pieces compared to the lives of the US and UK military, the Iraqi people, the Kurds, etc.
Linux International seems to have gone dead. It was amazing how LI was able to protect the Linux name from the insane US trademark system. But the LI web site seems to be complettely stagent. Instead of taking a stance on SCO's attack on Linux and Open Source, the LI web site continues to praise Caldera/SCO as a Corp. Sponsor.
When the source to the system you are employing is open to all, you have an advantage that cannot be matched by the closed-source vendors: The possibility of having someone local (and cheap) help support your system. It's standard, it's known, it was probably studied at school. Compare that to closed-source where you are dependent on the vendor or its designated partners for support.
Now as the article says, if you are a large corporation you might want to hire another large corporation for support. That's their right, and it's fine. But if you are a small company, or an entity with limited funds (such as a non-profit), it's nice to have the choice to get a local guy to help out instead at greatly reduced costs, and possibly even better quality if he or she is enthusiastic about the program in question.
Open as in free. Can't beat that advantage.
The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such
John can hide the entire open-source community in his beard to protect it and keep it warm.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
RMS has done alot of great service towards free software but he is a fanatic. Just read India's communist newspaper for more info . His comments on the SCO case show he does not care about the Linux kernel being fudded out of corporate America. He only cares about his precious gnu and views Linux as not part of it or just a kernel. This shows his radical side because he hates anything corporate.
I shudder whenever he opens his mouth. He really does make us in the free software community look bad.
Maddog however cares about Linux acceptance in corporate America and is in favor of other non gpl ( or non free according to RMS ) OSS like FreeBSD.
I wish people would look up to Maddog as the opensource leader instead of RMS.
http://saveie6.com/
I did RTFA and, while Hall indicated that looting of open source is a potential problem, he did not seem to me to be proposing any solutions. IMHO, the most important "protections" are to closely circumscribe software IP:
* ban software patents;
* allow enforcement of software copyright only where irrefutable evidence of infringement exists;
* provide a cheap, fast track method of dealing with frivoulous claims;
* free legal aid for non profit open source providers, but making deliberate misappropriation of IP a criminal offence.
You know, LI and Caldera/Lineo were best buddies for a long time. The original Caldera founders (Bryan Sparks and his friends from Novell) were good honest-to-goodness people who wanted to make Linux and OSS happen. But things started to degrade when Ransome Love replaced Bryan, and now SCO has nothing of Caldera left in it. Caldera was a good company (good as in benefactor of the community), got the first successful commercial Linux distro out back in 1995 (if I remember correctly), then got shafted by RedHat over RPM, then pretty much missed all the opportunities that could have made them great, and now they're just plain aggressive idiots.
In short : John Hall must feel like he's walking on eggs here. SCO isn't at all the Caldera he was talking to back in the good days. I wonder what ties remain between LI and SCO, and if they could be severed for good at last.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Nationalism.
I think this is the greatest strength of the OSS movement. When a government or country is going to invest millions of dollars into IT, doesn't it make sense for that money to be kept local? Munich signed SuSE, a Germany company. It only makes sense.
The great thing is that this fragmentization is a strength of OSM. A lot of small companies all working on OSS independantly, but all of them providing benefit to each other. It is a system where competition makes everyone stronger.
-Eyston
If you think about it for a bit... about a tenth of a second should be sufficient in most cases... no.
Copyright violation is not stealing. Let's all say it together: copyright violation is not stealing. It's just copyright violation.
What SCO is doing, however, is attempted theft (although not in the conventional sense). They're trying to take the IP for themselves, so no one else can have it (at least without paying SCO). This is taking from someone. Not just making a copy for themselves without permission. This is theft, not copyright violation.
His use of the term is almost ironically correct.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The open source movement is finally allowing the computer industry to build a shared pool of intelectual property which can be used to build new and innovate solutions. This has happened in the past in other industries for example the Chemical industry were the trade secrets of yesterday are the textbook examples of today. I think a law that allowed software to be declared "public domain" and forever protected from lawsuits/patents etc etc would be a good thing sort of like a reverse patent. It would allow the computer industry to finally join the rest of the world industries based on a shared core set of technologies.
I wasn't commenting on the orignal claims of 170,000, I was commenting on the /.er's claim that only a few were stolen, so in that context, yes it is the part that struck me.
The
Guardian reports "33 major items and around 2,000 minor works have gone". So to use the 33 number as the "real" number of items stolen is almost as bogus as the original claim (an exageration factor of 65 compared to a factor of 81 for the original claim). Over 33 major pieces and 2,000 pieces minor pieces from a museum in the birthplace of civilization is NOT inconsequential however it may relate to the original claim. Civilization is not about to be reborn again anytime soon so there is no replacing those items. Toss the numbers around however you'd like, there was a significant loss.
This approach can have massive benefits outside the United States--the country where most proprietary software originates--allowing greater price flexibility and a focus on specialized needs, Hall argued.
ZDNet generally sucks. It's doubtfull a free software advocate would really say that. Free software has the same massive benifits inside the US as it does outside the US. The Free Software Foundation is headquartered in the US, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are US citezens. Chances are that Hall mentioned that some software makers in the US might not be happy if free and open software supplanted their eXPensive wares and ZDNet inflated it to that. Software developers, like other profesionals, have long transended national boundaries. Only a maddog would think that US citezens and businesses have something less to gain from free software than someone in the UK.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When you take work someone else did, claim it's "derivative" and then keep them from using it, you are indeed a theif. SCO would essentially be destroying the original copy for the author as well as violating the author's intent for the software to be free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is a very strange comparison to make. OSS _is_ commodity software, by its very nature. You cannot get more commodity than perl, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Linux. Open standards are the only basis for true commodity software: TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.
Commercial software is not a commodity, it is the opposite, a corral in which users are captured and bled.
RMS' of course predicted the "Looting of OSS" (or rather was one of the first lootees) and this is why the GPL is so important. The looters become part of the movement.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Probably more expensive then the Microsoft offer, bear with me: Acording to the Register (and other sources, like Heise) Steve "Ape Dance" Balmer interrupted his skiing holidays in Switzerland to shmooz the Munich major and lure them in with very, very steep discounts. Munich however conducted a detailed study about long term aspects (not only costs, but the cost of being an addicted junkie in 5 years, when the dsicounts are no more 90%) and didn't let themselves be fooled.
Why not download a totally free distro and burn it to CD assuming you have the in-house resources?
Because that's not the way you do it, when you have to replace 14000 desktops. That might be fine for a company of 10 or 50 people, but not for a project of this magnitude. "Licensing costs" are probably irelevant here, it's primarily integration and services
SuSE teamed up with IBM in order to execute this project.
Hope this helps
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Perhaps he doesn't know where Linus came from.
The U.S. IS THE problem. Look between your own feet
before talking about what you see around you.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews