Complicated argument by Eben Moglen on the GPL, competition law, and MySQL.
"Earlier, I start a G+ discussion about Google and their "War on RSS", and spoke a bit about which organizations "out there" have a commitment to the Open Web and to Open Standards. In that brief and hastily written post, I came up with only four organizations (not "companies" mind you, but organizations in general) which seem committed to protecting access to technology in an open manner, and which could be said to promote something like the hacker ethic. The four I came up with initially were: 1. Mozilla 2. Free Software Foundation 3. Electronic Frontier Foundation 4. Red Hat"
Description of Conway's law.. also referred to as the "mirror hypothesis" in the management literature.
"I think that the survey reflects a continued misunderstanding among large companies about how widespread is the use of open source software.The failure to have an open source use policy is very dangerous in the world of complicated “hybrid†products: open source licenses do not mix well with commercial licenses without careful analysis."
Article by a leader of an internal HP "open source" user group type organization. Interesting.
"Trying to shift the burden of proof back onto themselves, I asked why they don't contribute to the open-source projects from which they derive so much value. Many indicated that it's too hard to contribute back to open-source projects due to internal legal issues and the high bar to knowing how to contribute. They suggested that they would instead prefer to pay the open-source companies to do that work for them."
"And therein lies the great paradox: Open-source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open-source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world. The traditional open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors."
The Economist takes up the issue of network services and autonomy!
Interesting in relation to the FSF lawsuit.
Nice post mostly about the fact that hosting free network services can be expensive and that self-hosting can be a rather tricky proposition.
