Comments on: Open Source Firms: What is an OS company, anyway?

By: Roberto Galoppini

Roberto Galoppini — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:53:54 +0000

@Stefano Maffulli: Stefano I couldn’t manage to comment your post (may be is it great time to become a FSFE Fellow in order to? ;-), so I am writing you here for the time being. Mission and CSR might help, but my guess is that it is more effective to judge firms by their actions, even if requires some effort.

@Open Source Solutions: I guested Carlo’s post even if I previously took a completely different position on the matter, and now I am seriously wondering about it all.

@Savio: you are raising the same point I early discussed with Carlo, amazing! We all know Google is taking advantage of the GPL loophole, but it is also true that is contributing to many projects, and we can’t also forget the Google Summer of code.

I think we should start creating categories reflecting the corporate-community relationship, and also the “old” Externally funded”/ “Internally funded” models. But all these (complex) distinctions might bring more confusion than clarity, I am afraid.

By: Savio Rodrigues

Savio Rodrigues — Thu, 31 May 2007 05:22:21 +0000

I agree Roberto, defining an OSS company is difficult and going to get increasingly so as more companies add OSS into their software strategy.

Something that I’ve been thinking about since OSBC, which relates to your post…

We’ve all heard about how open source Google uses to run their business. We also know that Google pays (some of their) employees to work on OSS projects as part of their day jobs. But what of all the OSS changes that Google makes and does not contribute back to the community? Does that make Google a ‘bad’ OSS company? How can they be ‘bad’ when they’re using OSS in a way that the OSS license allows??? But really, we all know that Google can’t be bad/evil, right

By: Open Source Solutions - From OSBC2007 SF Is freedom the right approach to BI

Open Source Solutions - From OSBC2007 SF Is freedom the right approach to BI — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:43:38 +0000

[...] F/LOSS - Free/Libre… Open… “Free as in speech, not as in beer” is well known. But how open is open? This is a question that continues to be debated in terms of whether or not a company is truly open source, pureblood or mudblood. Andy Astor puts forth the rationale behind EnterpriseDB’s strategy around openness [NB: EnterpriseDB is a company that is sometimes cited as a company using open source without being open source]. We tend to be fairly liberal in our acceptance of what is an open source company [including EnterpriseDB], while the market for enterprise open source defines itself and “commercial open source” has more denotation than connotation within that market, and I rather like the direction being taken in Commercial Open Source, cited above, by Carlo Daffara. Others may be more stringent in accepting a company as truly F/LOSS or not. [...]

By: ][ stefano maffulli » Free Software Business is about ethics

][ stefano maffulli » Free Software Business is about ethics — Wed, 30 May 2007 07:26:37 +0000

[...] Free Software Business is about ethics Free Software is first about ethics, not only licenses nor development models. Ethics in business has started to be considered as an important item and it’s not unusual nowadays to see Corporate Social Responsibility mentioned in business reports. That’s why I think that to qualify a Free Software Business we need to measure its orientation to doing good to freedom in the digital society. I’ve talked about this topic also in the past and I’m still convinced that consideration like the following from Roberto should come after looking at the companies missions and CSR reports. wp-content/update-feeds.php we ended up classifying OS firms as those that: [...]