Open Source Survey

Ken Coar (Apache Studmonkey and author of Apache Server for Dummies) has written in and asked us to complete A Survey on Open Source Involvment and Usage. He wants to use the data to help explain this whole thing to IBM. If you've got the time, I'm sure that the results will be very helpful to those suits out there.

Comments

IBM Perspective

[gavinhall]

Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:

I am a small cog in the big blue machine known as "IBM". In our internal Linux forums, the major debates about Linux seem to be legal issues regarding the GPL.

If we have developers work with GPL'd software, are they now intellectually "contaminated" and if so does that mean that they are now useless (legally) to move back to prorpietary products like AIX? I mean, what if said programmer accidentally bases some proprietary code off of what he learned from GPL'd code?

And what mechanisms can IBM put in place to ensure that intellectual property of IBM's is not compromised via GPL coding efforts?

I know many people here think that IP is bad, and personally I'm not a big fan myself, but IBM makes literally BILLIONS off of patent royalties alone and does not want to lose that significant source of income.

Most folks seem to think the problem is convincing the PHB's that they can make money off of free software. That's not the problem here. The problem here is legal issues for a company that has a lot invested in IP and how does it keep from contaminating GPL or proprietary code with code from the other?

You don't have to Code to Contribute

[gossamer]

Looking at the answers for the "Why aren't you involved" field,
answers semantically equivalant to "I can't code (much)" were pretty common. How do we get hold of these folks
and get them doing stuff like beta testing and submitting bug reports, writing documentation, that sort of stuff? There's PLENTY of non-coding stuff that open-source needs!

Agreed.

[Josh Turpen]

AFAIK, you can legally examine GPL'd code and create a proprietary product that is similiar. It all depends on how the phrase "based on [gpl'd code]" is interpreted as explained in the derivative works section of the GPL. If you look at how apache works and create a proprietary web server, is it a GPL violation? Hell no. It only is a violation if you use GPL'd code. Variable name changes and small algorithmic changes are AFAIK derivative works also. You can only use the basic idea and generic algorithms. How you define "basic" and "generic" is up to the judge though. Ultimately it requires faith, since a developer could independently come up with the same code as in a GPL'd counterpart. How many different ways do you really write a for() loop? ;) How hard is a simple web server to write? If you wrote a web server that was supposed to perform on par with Apache, don't you think it's insides would start to look like Apache's, due to the fact that they perform the same function.

You know what I think?

[DonkPunch]

I think that's the first time I've ever seen a "503 -- Server Too Busy" page that specifically mentions the slashdot effect.

"...this server is experiencing a peak load, probably due to the /. effect...."

Can we get that shipped as a default 503 page in Apache? It'd make Rob a legend! :)

"503 -- Server slashdotted. Please contact the site administrator and advise him to take this site off the quad-Xeon and put it on something more suitable -- like a 486."