There was recently a good suggestion on Slashdot about how to fix license complexity:

Object oriented licencing?

(Score:4, Funny)

by IPFreely (47576) <mark@mwiley.org> on Friday August 24, @06:36PM (#20349001)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 17, @10:12AM)

So what we really need is a smaller set of base licenses that include object oriented features like inheritence, interfaces and templates.

I can see it now:

public MyLicense extends BSD implements Attribution;

or

public NPL extends GPL implements OwnerTakeback;

Although it was written tongue in cheek, I think it would work.   There'd be a number of standard clauses that you would include in a license.  Clauses could inherit from other clauses.  Then the "what's in it for me" could be analyzed for each clause and you as an individual or company could choose to only use licenses with certain clauses and not use licenses that included other clauses. 

Now we just need a committee to come up with the infrastructure … that would of course have to be backwards compatible with all the existing licenses. 

The open source community is a pretty open and pretty tight knit community.  Not only do most people know most the other people, but there's a lot of open and public information about people from their own blogs to LinkedIn to Facebook to lots of media coverage.  So when I read this quote in the Register, I had to laugh:

The hapless Danese Cooper, an OSI board member and Intel employee, did her best, during the LinuxWorld panel, to avoid adding any substance to the discussion. So desperate for attention that she knits during panels, Cooper shrugged off the OSI criticism, saying that GPLv3 is in fact making its way through OSI's approval process just fine.

The guy obviously does not know Danese – hapless is not a word I would normally combine with Danese Cooper.  But even if he didn't know her, he could have found out a lot about her and her personality simply by Googling her, so not only does he look clueless, he looks incompetent too.

In today's world, there's no excuse for not getting your gossip or reputation slandering accurate.  It's all there on the web. 

(Danese blogged about her knitting.  Personally I think people are paying a lot more attention when they are knitting than when they are staring at their computer screens …)

LinuxWorld has an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds, Q&A: Torvalds on Linux, Microsoft, software's future.  I recommend reading it.  Linus comes across as a no-nonsense, I'm-not-going-to-get-involved-in-all-that-FUD, just-let-me-write-interesting-code, type guy:

"First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need?"

Here are three things I found interesting in the article.

• He said good things about the role companies play in open source:

The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers, and pushed people to improve usability etcetera, and I think commercial users of Linux have been very important in actually improving the product. I think all the technical people who have been involved have been hugely important, but I think that the kind of commercial use that you can get with the GPLv2 is also important — you need a balance between pure technology, and the kinds of pressures you get from users through the market.

• Having had several conversations with people that were reluctant to open source their baby, I appreciated this quote:

First off, even if you're the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it's really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don't worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They'll probably not even know about your work, and they'll certainly not think that it's worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can't really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught.

• He also tried to separate the open source software movement from the anti-Microsoft movement:

And the whole open source thing is not an anti-MS movement either. … Open source is a model for how to do things, and I happen to believe that it's just a much better way to do things and that open source will take over not because of any battle, but simply because better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things

Check out the interview to get a better sense of who Linus is.

"Copying open source is not a violation of copyright."  That's what I got out of the JMRI lawsuit, i.e. Jacobsen vs Katzer, i.e. the model railroad story.  Here's what I understand:

There was this model railroad guy who wrote some open source software, JMRI, licensed under the Artistic License.  (A bunch of other people also helped!)  The model railroad guy starts receiving bills for over $200K from a model railroad company saying that he is infringing on their patents and owes them royalties.

He figures he’s not infringing on their patents because he wrote his stuff first, so he sues the company for having a fraudulent patent and for copyright infringement.  The courts determine that the company actually did take the JMRI code, strip the copyright notices and use it.  However, they decide that is not copyright infringement.  Since the software was freely available and it’s a “nonexclusive license,” anyone can copy it and use it.  The fact that they didn’t include the copyright notices is a breach of contract not copyright.  But no damages are owed because the software is free.  So basically I think the company got away with stealing open source software!

I couldn’t find any mention of it anywhere, but it looks like their patents would be invalidated since there is clearly prior art.  (The code they copied.) So in a way JMRI won the case and the guy doesn’t owe $200K but open source took a step backwards.

What's that mean to open source software?  Nothing at the moment but if other courts decide the same thing, this could have lots of implications.  It definitely would mean that open source software licenses aren't nearly as strong as we thought and hoped they are.  That said, the few attorneys I've talked to seem to think this ruling was "wrong."

You can read more about this:

• On the JMRI page.
• On Groklaw.  (This is an older story and doesn't include anything about the recent story.)
• On Mark Radcliffe's blog. 

We've helped a lot of people create an open source policy.  The most common question is, can you share a real, live policy with us?  The answer is no, I can't share anyone else's policy with you (nobody wants to share them for some reason) but I can share what I know about them and I can point you at a few resources:

• You can download our free Open Source Policy Builder.  It contains all the questions we think you should answer in your open source policy – it's even multiple choice!  Although you'll probably want to add some more detail in your policy about why and how you chose the answers you did.
• You can take our free Open Source Best Practices survey that will tell you how your organization is doing as far as open source practices and policies.
• You can sign up for our Open Source Policy Workshop.  It's a one day workshop that teaches you everything you need to know if you are responsible for your organization's open source policy.  We have one in California in September and another one coming up in New York.  Not only is it a great way to get a lot of information about open source policy decisions, but it's also a great networking experience AND it's taught by yours truly.  We'll also have a guest speaker – someone who's done a great job of creating an implementing an open source policy at Bank of America, Tim Golden.

I'd love to see you at the workshop or to hear via blog or email how you created your policy!

Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail) has a really thought provoking post Can Open Source be giving comfort to the enemy?  He talks about how he works on unmanned drones in a very open source fashion and that his work is being used around the world, including Iran.  Right now, as far as he knows, it's all enthusiastic hobbiest but what if a terrorist uses his open source technology?  What if they post questions on the forum?  (Ignoring the fact that you probably wouldn't know they were terrorists.)  How far does the "no discrimination" rule of open source really go?

Food for thought: the US military uses a lot of open source software. 

The Peer-to-Patent project launched two months ago to very little fan fare – at least very little fan fare for such a big step.

So what is the Peer-to-Patent project?  The New York Law School launched the Peer-to-Patent project as a year long trial project endorsed by the US Patent and Trademark Office.  Peer-to-Patent lets the community review current patent applications and submit potential prior art.  Anybody can sign up and participate in the discussions, submit potential prior art or just follow the discussion.  Right now the patents up for review have been submitted voluntarily by their others.  (In addition to sponsoring the project, they are also hoping to get the patents approved faster than the typical four year process.)

Right on the Peer-to-Patent home page you can quickly find out what's happening.  They have 1347 community members, 176 comments and 56 uploads of potential prior art.  Pretty impressive!  These are people that are volunteering their time and effort to make sure that any new software patents that come out of this process are valid.  Faster, more valid, publicly discussed and understood software patents will eventually lead to less litigation and less fear of the unknown lawsuit.

And then there's a few people that advocate NOT helping because it might help the patent trolls.  I think there are better ways to target the bad guys.  Not participating in Peer-to-Patent because you were afraid the bad guys might learn too much would be kind of like prohibiting blogging technologies because terrorists can blog too.  More, open information along with good policies is the key!

There also appears to be a very large SecondLife following around the Peer-to-Patent project.  The project bought Democracy Island and holds regular discussions there. I'll let someone else blog about that though since I'm still resisting spending significant time in Second Life.  (I'd have to give up something else to find the time …)

 The GPLv3 is quickly moving in.  If you remember, we polled the OpenLogic Expert Community back in April and they said that the GPLv3 would move in quickly:

• 71% would be in favor of some or all of these projects moving to GPLv3
• 77% thought that it would take a year or less for their projects to move to GPLv3 once the final version of GPLv3 was released

Looks like they were right.  Palamida recently published some numbers where they conclude that 39% of all active SourceForge projects have moved to the GPLv3.  Less than two months after the GPLv3 has released, over 5000 projects have moved explicitly to the GPLv3!

Note that I recommend that you always take statistics with a grain of salt.  Both our survey and the Palamida post explain how we got to our numbers.  So while I think the general trend and direction that the numbers show is accurate, I think you could play with a lot with the numbers, especially "active projects" and get results that varied but they'd all point in the same direction – the GPLv3 is being broadly adopted.

I'm not sure how I feel about MySQL not providing public access to the source code for their enterprise edition – that's why I haven't blogged about it yet.   (They don't legally have to provide the source code to everyone – just the people they provide binaries to.  They also insist that the enterprise code is virtually the same as the community edition but they didn't provide a diff or any guarantees that they'd stay the same.  I guess I just don't see any reason why they wouldn't – if it's really the same, why not?)   I do know that I admire them for publicly posting what they were doing and why.  Kaj Arnö, MySQL's VP of Community, posted their decision in his blog where it is open for public consumption and debate.  That is in the spirit of open source.