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Interview: Ask Bruce Perens About Open Source Licensing
Bruce Perens is one of the mainstays of Linux and the Open Source movement, but he has never gotten as much publicity as Linus Torvalds, Richard M. Stallman or Eric S. Raymond. His latest project is TECHNOCRAT.NET. He sent in a few notes (hit "Read More" to see them) about what's happening on the Open Source licensing front, an area in which he is one of the World's Leading Experts(tm). Bruce will happily answer questions about Open Source and related software licensing issues. Instead of posting your questions here, please send them to questions@slashdot.org. We'll choose the 10 or 12 best ones, forward them to Bruce, and post the answers in a day or two.
When to Stop Complaining
I'm known for complaining, publicly, when I think something's wrong. There's
another side to that, though, if you want to be an agent for constructive
change and be taken seriously. When people fix what you are complaining
about, you can't just keep complaining, you have a choice of shutting up
or saying something nice. So, it's time to say something nice about two
huge companies.
Good News From IBM
A while ago, I publicly complained about IBM's termination clause in their
original Jikes license. Lots of people read my complaint and made
it clear they felt the same way, and IBM noticed. An IBM product manager
and attorney contacted me, they fixed their license, they released the
license for public criticism, and they put the new license on Jikes
and PostFix (IBM Secure Mailer). IBM is referred to as the
600-pound-gorilla of the computer industry, but in this case they were
an extremely polite and accommodating 600-pound-gorilla that did the right
thing for the community. They should be praised for that. I like their
new license so much that I'm going to use PostFix as the mail-delivery
agent on my own system. I've been using qmail, but its license isn't
really compliant with the Open Source Definition so it's time to switch.
Apple, Too
The Debian developers and I publicly complained about the original Apple
Public Source license. Again, lots of people read our complaint and helped
get the message across to Apple. The press and even some Open Source pundits
handled our complaints very poorly, treating them as an "attack" rather
than the constructive criticism we meant. Apple, however, handled our criticism
extremely well. They addressed our complaints in the APSL version 1.1 .
Again, a big company that should be praised for doing the right thing for
the community.
Other Companies
Lots of other companies have recently come out with software that complies
with the Open Source Definition. They all seem to be taking an OSD-compliant
license quite seriously as a prerequisite for community participation in
their projects, and many companies are contacting me for a reality-check
before they release their licenses for public criticism. I've been able
to save a few of them from embarassing gaffes. I'm currently working with
several really big companies on OSD-compliant licenses.
You hold copyright on everything you write. If you don't grant them permission to reproduce it, they can't without risking an unwinnable lawsuit. You'd end up with something that looked like this:
Q (Deleted due to copyright issues)
A Yes, that's correct.
Furthermore, they didn't want to limit what they did with those questions; they might want to post them somplace else, reproduce them in an interview, publish them in a book, or whatever. Assuming that you granted them all these rights would be wrong. Telling you ahead of time "Don't submit material if you aren't willing to do this" is perfectly honorable. Not asking for exclusive rights is, too.
You sound like your are confusing copyrights and license. They could have simply asked for a liberal license while you retain copyright! Look closely, this is what the GPL is all about.
Of course! I read almost *all* Slashdot comments. And I respond to all the e-mail I get, too, most of which says, "Don't pay any attention to anonymous flamers, you're doing fine."
I don't claim to know everything. I take all feedback, both negative and positive, quite seriously. I just don't feel that I'm important enough to be worth much public discussion, so I tend to confine my responses to private e-mail instead of making them in public.
For instance, the story to which *this* comment is appended is about Bruce Perens, a truly nice man for whom I have tremendous respect, and I feel bad about taking up even this little bit of *his* limelight.
If you want to continue this discussion, let's do it by e-mail, okay?
I consider that the use of the is of identity is a dangerous construct, that should be avoided in a manner similar to the goto constuct.
(Also, the subject appears to confuse the assignment with the equality test).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A lot of the engineers inside Sun are pissed at the SCSL in a big way - particularly the commercial clause. At JavaOne, a number of different BOFs that I attended, when Sun lawyers were present, they copped a hammering about the SCSL (admittedly I was one of the people doing said hammering). From memory the SCSL and JINI BOFs were the two most problematical for their legal types.
Here's what I know is going on inside at the moment. The Java Media folks are pushing through a version of SCSL that does not include the commercial clause. That is, you can pretty much do anything you like with it - no compatibility checks, no license fees etc. Take the source and run. I imagine this would bring it extremely close to satisfying the open source guidelines. Naturally the Sun legal people are having a hard time swallowing this so it is taking some time to get through (It's been going at least for the last 3 months that I know of). Note that this is not changing the core SCSL, just a variant of it minus the crappy bits (like the Jini License is a variant of the SCSL).
The first of the Java Media APIs to undergo this is JSDT (Java Shared Data Toolkit). Once this goes through, pretty much all of the rest of the Java Media stuff will be following in quick succession. (Java3D, Media Framework, Sound and Advanced Imaging).
BTW - This is not leaking any private information. The Sun people at the JSDT BOF were the ones talking about this (Rich Burridge and Mike Bundschuh (sp?)) out in the open. Also, directly talking with the various Java Media marketing types and engineers running the stands there were talking about it too.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
Better Form:
:)
(Bruce == REAL_WORK) && (ESR == (MS_HATE | SELF_EGO))
/* I prefer to use explicit parenthesis rather than trust precedence, but that's just me. */
BTW -- Has anyone else noticed that Bruce's last name "Perens" is awfully close to "parens" -- the programmer shorthand for "parenthesis"? Some people say your name determines your destiny....
Of couse, MY real name is "Curly Brackettes"
Also, the subject appears to confuse the assignment with the equality test
It could be valid - he's assigning real work to
Bruce, and testing ESR's motives ^_^
K.
-
How come there's an "open source" entry in the
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
What makes slashdot `management' think they should be the sole arbiters of what constitutes a good question?
/., allow the moderation scheme to float the cream to the top and then skim the cream.
/. rulers have gone power hungry and want to control everything. :^)
Possibility #1: Because they want to use this same process for other entities who might not know how to handle thousands of duplicate and/or 'drecky' responses.
I bet it simply never occured to them to ask everybody to post their questions to
Possiblity #2: Muwahahahahaha!
I think things will be a bit different the next time around.
-matt
I'm sure that Bruce will follow this thread, and the thread on the followup article. Ask you questions there, and if Bruce thinks they're worth answering, I suspect he will. You can't get much more open than that.
Slashdot is actually just providing a filtering service. No everyone cares enough about any given issue to read the comments, but Rob tries to filter out the most interesting bits to the articles proper. I don't really care enough about say, The Who, the see what people have to say about it, but it's kinda neat to know about Lighthouse. On the other hand, I'm real interested in what Bruce Perens has to say (at the least he is an interesting writer), so I follow threads on such things.
Anyway, in summary Rob/Slashdot filters questions. This is to allow those who are cursorily interested to get a quick glimpse of the action. Those of us who really care will read and post to the thread, which I expect will be chock full of Bruce replies.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
nor always a good thing. On the whole, I think the world is made a better place by Dan Bernstein's existance. Yes, the man has his warts, but he also has his gems too.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Perhaps you've simply noticed that Eric doesn't brag about what he's done? Don't you respect his humility?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yeah, I've always considered Bruce 'The Linux Nut who dosen't make a fool of himself in public' ;)
Eric brags more about how much he's done for how little he's done than anyone else in the industry.
I've noticed that you're a very active member of the qmail mailing list, and would like to thank you for your contributions.
On a more on-topic note, qmails redistribution rules (such as they are) have always slightly bothered me. There was a thread some months back re: RedHat and qmail that highlighted some of the feelings people had.
I think that Dan's managed to harness the usual benefits of Open Source in a slightly unusual manner: by making his code highly modular, it's fairly trivial to write alternatives to the standard modules that do what you want. This attracts a wider range of coders. A more monolithic application with sort of license would probably have languished for want of acceptance.
- Tillman Hodgson
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
I typed that message too quickly. What I meant to say was that you contribute a bit to actual work that needs to get done (more so than Eric, much less so than Richard), and you speak from ethics, not egoism. I respect you quite a bit, but not as much as Richard. I should have been more thourough in my original post. I just type that section too quickly, as the goal was to day "Richard is good, Bruce is fine as well, but how the heck did we get this jerk named Eric to be seen as representing us."
(On a side note, I view maintain packages, writing documentation, etc. every bit, if not more, respectable than writing code. Both need to get done, and writing code is a good deal more fun.)
I really respect Richard Stallman. He first writes code, and then advocates. He wrote Emacs, the initial version of gcc, and dozens of other programs.
Bruce doesn't code much. He managed a few Debian packages, but he's pretty much just a politician. His motives are noble, but he is sometimes a bit hot headed. I respect him, but not nearly as much as Stallman.
I don't respect Eric at all. He hasn't written that much code (rewrote Fetchmail, and wrote a few tiny utilities). He hasn't seen that many projects. He advocates open source, but he doesn't completely understand it, and at the same time, he's an egomaniac, and tries to grab credit for everything (he recently attributed the recent success of free software to his Open Source movement, rather than the source just reaching the level of maturity where it is useable in the mainstream).
I don't see how people like Eric, and to some extent Bruce, become known as the heads of this movement, where they've done fairly little actual work. Shouldn't the credit instead go to actual coders like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Emmanuel Marty, Larry Wall, etc?
Pretty much, plus more. Usually, they tell you to go away unless they can change what you send them and still put it under your name. Kind of like signing a blank check or more like signing a partially filled-out form. I was tought to never do that. But apparently there are plenty of people willing to accept the risks in return for the glory.
No, it's a completely open list. If that causes problems I'll run a half-moderated list. A person's first posting is automatically moderated, but the second goes through. I already do it with the mgetty, fsb, lego-robotics, and quickcam-drivers mailing lists. Keeps 99% of spam off the list at a fairly low cost.
Good point about dropping the -subscribe.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
qmail has this nice wildcarding facility, where you can send all mail with a certain prefix to a certain file. So all mail sent to list-XYZ goes to a script which interprets XYZ as a command. Very sweet.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Someone pointed out the other day that "technocrat" is an anagram of "trenchcoat". :-)
Knowing when to acknowledge when people have changed shows that Bruce is more than just a hothead. Hopefully this rational discourse will benefit similar efforts in the future.
Also there is license-discuss@ opensource.org, a mailing list where Bruce has been a very active participant. (I hope that doesn't stop!)
Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824
The Reuse Rocket: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.
Are you sure? It's not slash, it's Squishdot (built on Zope, which is built on Python).
Admittedly, the look-and-feel is "borrowed" from Slashdot, but the underlying technology is completely different. Check The Technology behind TECHNOCRAT.NET for more info.
Moo!
Good point, I'll remember your advice in the future. But it would have to be a pretty good robot harvester to process
and get an address...That's the HTML format that shows on the page. Notice the space.
BTW, isn't it a closed list anyway (only posts from subscribers are accepted?) That's the only good way of keeping spam off mailing lists.
I'd think that if robots can be taught to remove "NOSPAM" from email@domain.NOSPAM.com, then they certainly already know about dropping "-subscribe" from subscription addresses.
Sorry about the Anonymous Coward thing, I don't care much for creating a /. account.
We have done some very heavy testing with Zope on high performance machines, and we have done well over a million hits a day with the ZPublisher architechture (ZPublisher is the Object Request Broker in the very core of Zope which turns HTTP/FTP/XML-RPC requests into object traversals) on modest PII hardware.
We are also working on an add-on to Zope (which will NOT be open source) that is a client server version of the object database. This way, you can just keep throwing more and more clients at a database and have 50 machines serving up the same site over multiple pipes. This archetecture will not be needed for low to medium traffic sites. We envison this to be able to handle as much traffic or more than any other web application platform.
Michel Pelletier
Zope Developer
michel@digicool.com
I don't know if it is his 768 k-bit pipe or the Apache/Zope/Squishdot engine on a Pentium 120, but the site is just about gone.
I'd like to see some benchmarks for Zope on different configurations. This just highlights the need.
If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
Please don't give out that address!!!!!!!! If you do, spammer's robots will find it and start spamming it. Instead, give out the subscribe robot's address. It will tell the users the submission address after they subscribe, plus it doesn't care if it gets spammed. Here's the right address to tell people:
license-discuss-subscribe@opensource.org
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
What makes slashdot `management' think they should be the sole arbiters of what constitutes a good question?
If Bruce is going to answer questions about Open Source the forum should be, um, OPEN.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
qmail is an exception to the Open Source Definition. Purportedly, a project has to allow redistribution of modified binaries in order to get all the benefits of Open Source. Yet, Dan Bernstein has been able to do this without it. The answer is, of course, that very few of us can even approach being a Dan Bernstein.
I'm on the board of the Open Source Initiative, and I use qmail because it's reliable and secure.
-russ
p.s. I also sell support for it.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Roblimo's style doesn't really fit well with the other posters (except perhaps John Katz). This may be because he's more of a professional, but it can come off as too polished and too editorial.
I like the way most content is presented on slashdot: There's a submitter's intro, a link, and a few lines from the poster. The submitter and the poster usually include personal opinions, but they are easily recognized as such and everyone can make up their own mind about the content of the link.
This post from Roblimo does not present his take on the article as a personal opinion, and, ironicly, he's probably the poster on slashdot least qualified to make the statements he does.
I'm not saying I don't like the article, but this new presentation is a turnoff. It seems too much like "Here's the way it is" instead of "Check this out and come to your own conclusions."
-OT (who has complained too much recently, I know)
By submitting this message, you grant TECHNOCRAT.NET and its owners a separate and independent copyright to your posting, and you retain your own copyright. Thus, we can do whatever we want with your posting, and so can you.
What is that all about?
Posted by BigOrno:
Not that I have anything against ESR, but I sometime feel like what Bruce is doing is more along the "open source" spirit, i.e. do real work in the background that benefits to everybody, than ESR "high visibility" activities. What do you think ?
I'd think that if robots can be taught to remove "NOSPAM" from email@domain.NOSPAM.com, then they certainly already know about dropping "-subscribe" from subscription addresses.
You would be surprised what spam robots don't do. I append "-abuse" to my username, ie: bishop-abuse@foo.bar, when posting to newsgroups and I have never been sent a spam to that address with or without the -abuse tag.
Bruce is working hard for all of us. ESR is an ego bloated maniac working hard for (ug!) himself.
/. ESR paid moderators will push this post down the list. Reality is always hard to come to terms with. Whatever.....
Yeah,
What are you hinting at? Who are these mysterious companies that you've been dealing with? At least hint... Pleeeease!!!
Do not read this
If you look at the bottom of every
It would be interesting to see how a court resolved a copyright dispute under the Technocrat scheme.
IANALOALS
Roblimo, are you reading this?
I'm just wondering, because I'm somewhat surprised Bruce isn't using the GPLd Exim for his MTA. I've found it to be quite good, and it scales up well to at least several thousand users. Easy to configure, too. It doesn't support some of the more exotic transports like BITNET or FidoNet, though, I think.
I'm guessing security, since I seem to recall a quasi-flamefest on Bugtraq between qmail and Secure Mailer over that issue.
--
It should be license-discuss-request@opensource.org !
The article was written by Bruce, not Roblimo. Your criticism is still valid, but I just wanted to point that one out