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  • Roberto Galoppini 9:29 pm on April 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Evangelism: Whurley first TalkBMC post 

    William Hurley, who recently joined BMC as Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy, yesterday wrote his first TalkBMC post, explaining clearly what open source is to him.

    cureAn odd cure by Mr Jaded

    Nestled between Proprietary and Freedomberg, Opensville is a utopia. Everyone who lives in the adjacent cities spends their free time in Opensville. The parks are beautiful, the shopping is amazing, and the nights are pure Vegas. Sounds like a great place, huh? One problem: no one actually wants to live there. No one wants to pay the taxes or put in the effort it takes to keep the city running. Welcome to Opensville, population zero. [..]

    Nagios is one of the most popular monitoring projects in open source, and one of the most abused. There are countless projects, products, and services predicated on the Nagios code base—some symbiotic, others non-contributing parasites. What separates legitimate use from outright exploitation? Where would you draw the line? Should violators be black-listed by the community?

    To me, open means that everyone can participate on a level playing field. As a community we have to take the good with the bad, but I cringe when I see a project taking more than its fair share of punishment. How will the community address this problem? Should there be a rating system? A sort of mooch-o-meter to rank companies and projects that use open source? Would that subjective hierarchy help or hurt the community? How would it be regulated?

    The community has to answer some of these questions if open source is to continue to flourish. Everyone who leads, participates in, or utilizes an open source project should realize they have a personal interest in protecting it from abuse. Keeping the pirates honest will take effort, but the repercussions of apathy will affect us all in the future. Besides, tales of the pirate hunters are often more exciting than the tales of the pirates themselves.

    As Matt Asay William seems to think that the best policing mechanism to answer the question is the community, but auto-referentiality might also be dangerous.

    Could the cure be worse than the ill, eventually?

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, whurley, asay, bmc

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:29 pm on March 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Community development: all communities are not the same 

    Reading the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) I happened to read “Care and feeding open source programmers” an article about the “HandBrake manifesto“, a post defining what Open Source is for his author.

    Open source is:

    • A means to encourage software innovation among diverse groups of programmers
    • A policy of open inspection and analysis of source code, both to educate and provide a means for constructive criticism
    • A means by which programmers can “scratch their itch” for mental stimulation while at the same time solving computing problems that are frequently applicable even to non-technical users
    • Free, both intellectually and in terms of cost

    Open source is not:

    • A way to get commercial-quality support at no charge
    • A free-for-all forum to ask for pie-in-the-sky software features and expect them to be implemented as requested and with no delay
    • An invitation to harass and otherwise frustrate a small and dedicated development staff because they didn’t do what you wanted

I can see here many disagreeing on that, but I believe there is no doubt that any author can choose his/her community, choosing not to have one (or even something like that).

Authors have the power, and users too indeed! I start thinking Rubini is pretty right…

Technorati Tags: Open Source Community, HandBrake

 

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:04 pm on March 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Novell: Novell’s apologizing is a sign of .. ? 

    Matthew Aslett’s article “Novell apologizes for false free software funding claim” tells the full story of Novell’s head of marketing for Linux and open source, Justin Steinman, who just apologized to the FSF after making misleading statements about the company’s financial contribution to the FSF.

    Steinman made the claim in an online interview last week but was quickly forced to retract the statement after the FSF’s executive director Peter Brown disputed it via a statement to the Groklaw web site.

    “Novell last gave funds to the FSF in October 2005, when they donated $5K as part of FSF Corporate Patron program. Since their deal with Microsoft was announced we have not asked them to renew as a patron, nor would we. Novell is not ‘a significant financial contributor to the Free Software Foundation’,” Brown stated.

    In his apology Steinman stated that he believed his original statement to be true at the time he made it, but nevertheless apologized for misrepresenting the facts.

    “Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market,” he wrote. “I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.”

    Read the full story and wonder what is going on at Novell, I have no clue..

     

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