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John Terpstra on Challenges to Free Software
Telex4 writes "Anyone who has read John Terpstra's article on Groklaw about Intellectual Property (IP) rights will be interested to read an interview I did recently with John at KDE's World Summit. We talked about what IP means to the free software community, how we can drive GNU/Linux adoption, and how he thinks the IT market will change in coming years. He gives us a lot to think about in terms of what more we should be doing."
He gives us a lot to think about in terms of what more we should be doing.
Are we supposed to impose change on others? Is it just me, or are the most sweeping changes just gradually accepted - especially when current ideas need to be totally re-thought (i.e. Open vs. Closed Source)?
Software that pays me to use it. Other than that, I'll stick with the free stuff.
The first person who says OSS when he means FS in this thread gets my metaphorical foot up his avatar ass.
-Peter
These days IP has spun out of control I think (in the patent office at least). You can get patents for things that are so common sense it's ridiculous. I liked on the Tonight Show when Dave Chapelle said he ran into this rich white guy, and when he asked how he got rich, the guy responded, "My family owns the patent for fire"
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
If IP law continues the way it is Free Software will be the only alternative for consumers. Businesses are treating their customers like criminals and these customers will only take it for so long. People are becoming aware of the draconian approach to IP and they are beginning to reject it in favor of more open solutions.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Terpstra's comparison of FLOSS to the Enlightenment and Reformation and of the negative reaction on the part of parts of the software and media industries to the reaction of the Church is interesting and I think well taken. We should remember that some countries in effect have still to undergo the Englightenment, that even in countries that did, many people remain who hold irrational and antiscientific views, and that in some countries the Counter-reformation was successful. The FLOSS movement is important for freedom and for technological progress, but precisely because it is important, its opponents will work hard to suppress it, and they may succeed.
Don't mod me down, I'm serious ... the warez scene is the biggest contributer making software free (in the financial sense), and it's healthy for the industry. Seriously, what percentage of the apps on your Windows machine did you pay for, inclusing the OS itself? I'm about 50%, mostly games. But more software stimulates the industry, and what we use at home is what we want to use at work - and there's where the real money is, in the corporate world. The software publishers know this too, which is why it is so easy to find keygens for MS and other popular products ... people know Windows and Photoshop because they pirated them at home, and they want to use it at work where businesses won't pirate software. That is also the reason why game software has such annoying copy protection you don't see elsewhere, a "free" copy doesn't help sell 100 corporate licenses. Unless you work someplace where they do install games at every desktop, then please tell me where to send a resume.
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"The two most important strategies we must adopt are to encourage and adhere to open standards, which undermine big IP oriented business' ability to monopolise and dominate the marketplace.
I think John misses the point over what makes some companies dominate and why open source won't help small business.
John doesn't have the same defintion of domination and the definition of "fundamental reshaping" as everyone else. Open source software has been VERY successful in the building blocks of software. GNU/Linux as an operating system; Eclipse as an IDE, MySQL as a database.
However, there are niche applications where the open source investment will be slow, painful, and probably not pan out. If you think open source will unseat AutoCAD, don't hold your breath. It may happen, but it won't be this decade. And Adobe Photoshop STILL dominates in image processing, even though GIMP is rather useful.
Domination (especially due to IP) is also a relative term. Microsoft can be seen to dominate the OS and "office" market today; those are prime targets of OS software. But IBM has a huge IP portfolio - is one of the large companies 'appear[ing] to support open source' and yet has a lot less to lose (on a relative scale to Microsoft). Even if IBM's software group (DB2, Lotus Notes, et al.) took it in the teeth from open source, is that going to have a (negative) impact on IBM Global Services? Will it not be the same dominating behemoth it is today?
The "fundamental reshaping" of the market will come when technology becomes pervasive, reliable, and easy enough to use that the Fortune 500 doesn't NEED to call IBM Global Services any more. Until then, someone has to put everything together, and open source reducing the procurement cost isn't going to change that. Solve the reliability and ease of use problems for small business and you WILL win in the marketplace - whether or not you're open source.
IP is not a problem for him - in fact he challenges the software community who reject the term IP to provide a better way of describing in cogent terms the very substance of creative thinking that is embodied in free software
I'll be happy to take a swing at this one. Actually, it might not be a swing though. I guess you could call it a duck, but it's still a fight tactic. My position would be that a replacement term is unnecessary.
This sounds a lot like the argument that without copyright law there would be no GPL. Just because that is true does not make it meaningful. It's quite a silly thing to say. Yes, it's true that without copyright law there would be no GPL, but without a copyright there would be no need for a GPL.
So, this mission to find a replacement term for intellectual property is totally unnecessary. You can call an idea, an idea. Likewise you can call software, software. There's no need to come up with a replacement for the phrase "intellectual property."
He talks a lot about supporting small and medium sized business. I think that is important too, which is why suso.org is going to be expanding to do OSS support specifically for small and medium sized business. But I think there needs to be a lot more support businesses around the world. Say, at least one for every city bigger than 50k people.
I think that a lot of businesses still want local support and get frustrated with "national based support" and are not making the switch because there is not much local support for Linux.
With the opening up our support business, I'm going to put together some information on how other businesses can get started on this. A central respository for everyone on how to get an OSS/Linux support business going would be really helpful to OSS.
Anyone else interested?
I agree with Mr Terpstra that migration from closed source technology to open source technology should be simplified
How about we start with migration of Win NT domain controllers to Samba domain controllers.
For over 2 years I have held off on upgrading our NT Servers to 2000 or 2003 Servers in hopes that we could migrate to Samba.
But I have yet seen a simplification of these migration path, unless you use roaming profiles. I don't know that many places where roaming profiles are utilized.
And in a small to medium size business where there are 25 to 100 computers, transfering profiles and file permissions can be very time comsuming and expensive.
To take Mr Terpstra's example of an Access database, I would rather do that, Oh wait, I already did that, but it was actually a SQL Server to PostgreSQL.
So I'm still waiting for a reasonable migration path from NT Server to Samba.