Interesting blog post about the difficulty of chasing up old copyright licenses.
I've always hired free and open source software developers. But I guess I'm probably difference.
I think David is wrong. Almost everyone I know who makes it a requirement of any job they seek that it will only include work on free software can do so. Those that want to work primarily on free software have very little trouble. Do you get a choice of all jobs? No. Are the jobs as interesting or as high paying? You can't count on it.
You have to be very very good to work on free software only without compromising. But I think that might be asking a bit too much.
Via Marcell: "The fact that the current policy of not releasing documentation and providing source code only to their immediate customers, as well as the frequent abomination of binary-only kernel modules also effectively prevent any independent third party (commercial or non-commercial) to actually provide such a solution based on a particular hardware offering. Thus, it is actually not an anti-FOSS environment, but an anti-competitive environment. By opening up at whatever level and enabling (or even encouraging) any third party to build on top of your product, you encourage a market and encourage competition. A market with actual competition will increase innovation due to competition. In the end, any customer who wants to use the actual chip will have more software options, and thus the resulting product will be able to reach more markets and boldly go where it hasn't gone before."
"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."
How can ESR write this and not mention Eric von Hippel?
"The definitive collection of research into Open Source software"
Article by Jeremy Allison about why mono is a problem. I think he's right.
"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."
Nice article! Maybe the babe in the bikini is not so necessary to this article about free software and politics that mentions Indonesia?
