OSI Board Blog

It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0. As I wrote in Open Sources, it was the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point). Having first read and lightly hacked Emacs code in 1985, having read and lightly hacked GDB code in 1986, I eagerly attended a week-long lecture series on Emacs Stallman gave in Febrary 1987 at MCC in Austin Texas.

Yesterday I was blog-tagged by Stephen Walli. Does the fact that he tagged for other people mean that I'm not "it"? Oh well...the topic is one that interests me, and I think he started the ball rolling in an interesting direction, so I figure I'll add my thoughts.

For my money, the three ways that open source can benefit one's business (presuming you are in the business of open source) is:

In 2003, Nicholas Carr shook up an increasingly irrelevant community of CIOs by publishing the article "IT Doesn't Matter". I believe that he got it half right: the irreversable trend of information technology was toward commodity economics, and thus the idea of paying rents for proprietary software was preposterous. What he did not quite get right was to properly recognize that his insight was itself a strategic enabler for those intelligent enough to understand the competitive consquences of the trend he identified.

A few months ago I posted my initial impressions for a draft version of the GPLv3 license, and I am happy to say that as with other licenses developed with community input, the then-good GPLv3 has continued to improve. As I read the "final" draft version of GPLv3, which I think is truly excellent, I thought about the discussions from last year about some other licenses submitted to the license-discuss@opensource.org mailing list.

The news outlets, radio waves, and blogosphere [1] and [2] continue to buzz with responses to the FORTUNE magazine article where Microsoft claims that many popular Open Source software packages, including the Linux kernel, infringe some

Note: this is just my opinion. The OSI board may have a different opinion if it speaks as a body.

Microsoft is spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with their latest anti-Linux patent campaign. If they had an actual, solid case of patent infringement, they would go to a judge, get an injunction against the distribution of Linux, and sell patent licenses for FreeBSD. The fact that they don't, but are willing to sell patent licenses for an unnamed set of infringed patents, says that they have no legal case.