I'm starting to think that the dynamics of Open Source production are such that user licenses are crap. Yes, I'm saying that everything that we've put into licenses, all the thought, all the drama, all the durm-und-strang, is wasted. You might wonder why.
Andy Updegrove posts yet another insightful analysis on the evolution of standards in the modern technology. He reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided 3-to-2 that a licensing promise made in a standards development process trumps the private right to hold licensees for ransom when a 3rd party later acquires the patent. This is bad news for patent trolls, but great news for the rest of us.
The Ardour project is an open source digital audio workstation. To many in the recording studio business, digital audio workstation is written DAW. Unwritten is widely held belief that recording studio platforms come in two varieties: proprietary native platforms like Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows, and DigiDesign's HD system (which is a proprietary hardware add-on). Ardour demonstrates that there is a new game in town, and that new game is open source.
I just read an excellent summary of the top 10 SE Linux stories of 2007, and it reminds me that I owe the world a blog posting about the amazing vision and accomplishments of the SE Linux project.
We've gotten a number of licenses submissions over the years, which attempt to be "succinter than thou". I guess that people feel that even a license as simple as the BSD license is too complicated.
Most of you know me as President of the Open Source Initiative, but I am also Chair of the Fundraising Committee. Over the years we have raised monies large and small from companies large and small, public and private, and we have had great participation from individual donors as well. In fact, this year was probably a record in terms of the total number of different people supporting the OSI--which is cause alone to celebrate.
As part of our ongoing effort to improve transparency and encourage participation, the Open Source Initiative is announcing a major restructuring of our public mailing lists, effective immediately. Moving forward, OSI's public discussions of Open Source issues will be concentrated on three major mailing lists:
As promised, we've dramatically expanded and rechartered the OSI mailing lists. In particular, we have split license review and general OSI issue discussions out from "license-discuss" list, to allow the latter to focus on maintaining the new Licensing FAQ.
We continue to work on several other process and website improvements. Stay tuned!
-- Ernie P.
OSI Board Observer
Since there has been some confusion as of late, I've posted an updated Code of Conduct. Hopefully this (along with planned charter revisions) will improve our overall mailing list climate.
