Perens: 'Badgeware' threat to open source's next decade
Je ne regrette rien - kinda
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
10th birthday interview Bruce Perens doesn't regret the fact that, since officially co-birthing open source with The Cathedral and the Bazaar author and hacker Eric Raymond ten years ago, Linux and open source have moved from the sandal-wearing fringes to acceptance by Wall Street and big, closed-source industry giants.
Nor does he feel remorse at the fact that Linux and open source established a pervasive presence on servers and handhelds such as Motorola's RAZR, and that they are now proving popular in browsers, languages and developer frameworks.
In fact, Perens is so convinced that open source culture - such as collaborative working in a community - has proven so adept at creating high quality products like Firefox for lower costs and reduced risk to individuals, he believes the open source philosophy will spill over into non-IT areas like education materials and manufacture of business and consumer goods in the next ten years.
No. If Bruce Perens could change anything from that day in February 1998 when he announced the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative he'd alter the very way open source licenses are ratified, to halt what he regards as the chief threat to the next ten years of open source: license proliferation.
Perens said the growth in licenses, especially the emergence of "badgeware", or attribution licenses used by numerous open source companies, such as last year's Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), is dangerous. Today, we have 68 licenses ranging from the well-known GNU General Public License(GPL) to the, well... the OCLC Research Public License 2.0 recognized by the OSI.
Badgeware puts open source on a slippery slope to the approval of ever-more restrictive licenses. The OSI - the body that ratifies all open source and Linux licenses - has failed to establish a clear guideline for approving badgeware, and apparently acted arbitrarily, leaving left us potentially open to even more badgeware. "It was not clear to me that by granting this license [Socialtext] that the OSI can hold the line. They have to come up with a rationale," Perens told Reg Dev in an interview.
While Perens supports recognition of developers' work, he believes badgeware licenses threaten the very essence of open source and Linux - their creativity - because such licenses put arbitrary terms and conditions on developers. Badgeware makes the software's use ever more restrictive and leaves individual developers open to attack from America's biggest single export: litigious attorneys.
"I wasn't prepared for [license proliferation]- I might have structured it differently had I known," Perens conceded. "I'd have suggested putting a non-proliferation clause in the Open Source Initiative and designed the licence approval process, so it was a bad idea to submit a licence that does the same as another licence."
Perens believes he can't now insert such a clause and - in lieu of that fact - believes the best hope for the next ten years is for open source and Linux projects and technologies to be licensed under GPL3 or LGPL3, successors to GPL2 and LGPL2. "Because of the legal scrutiny those licenses have had," said.
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COMMENTS
Hmmm .....???
Now here's a Novel Coincidence? Microsoft talking of Everything Changing too ..... http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/business/peopleready/NewWorldofWork.pdf
Late to the Party again, chaps? Wanna a Run down on what you've been missing?
Unilateral DisArmament .... NEUKlearer Cold Fusion?
Mark, Thank you for your opinion, it is perfectly as valid as any of the other 6,650,258,927 ...... 07:41 GMT (EST+5) Feb 13, 2008 ..... http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html
It is not cricket, even whenever richly deserved, to call the Status Quo that are Governments and its Monetary Control Masters, Incompetent to the Point of Self Destructive Madness, and to have an Acquiescent and Complementary Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Shady Intelligence Source Forces fostering and fuelling not unreasonable thoughts of an inGlorious Feather Nesting with the Abuse of Power, rather than Challenging Knights, Boldly Going into the Future with AI Beta Use for Power and its Monetary Control Masters, is neither Intelligent, nor in this Day and Age of Instant Electronic Messaging, Acceptable. I Trust in Global Operating Devices that you find that not unreasonable or outlandish/alien?
Get Used to IT Changing Everything. After All, all that there Really is, is the Future and that is Never Ever expected to be the Same as the Past, and as the Present is only always a Fleeting Moment in Time immediately rendered to the Past, it too, is [Virtually] Unreal and fully expected to be Different/a Better Beta.
Therefore, Thoughts in the Present of the Future/Thoughts for the Future in a Present, are the True Nature of Reality and that makes Life Virtually Real and Controllable /Steerable with Future Thoughts Shared/Globally Peer Reviewed. These would, by their very Nature, be expected to be Different and/or Original.
Does that make sense to you? And if not, where not? Identify that Bottleneck and IT Resources will Zero in 42 UNblock the Information Flow...... Ease ITs Passage.
@amanfromMars
Can you cut down a little bit. Post as much as you like, but make more sense. I'm not even reading *any* of your posts any more because there are too many without any sense to them.
When they were a little less common, they were read and occasionally funny or interesting.
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