[maemo-developers] Open Source Software New Global Alliance - proposal

[From: George Farris]

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 09:52 -0500, ed at okerson.com wrote:
> Darius,
> 
> You seem to have missed the whole point of the Open Source Software
> movement.  Many people, myself included, have been working for years to
> promote the use of "Free Software", and that means Free as in Speach, as
> well as Free as in Beer.  What that means is that after the software is
> published, other people are free to use it how they see fit, that includes
> making products around it and making money from it.  When you buy a
> Tom-Tom GPS unit, you are paying for their GPS and mapping software,
> integrated into a nice hardware unit, not just the Linux operating system
> that is on it.  It is perfectly legal if they want to have some kind of
> hardware lock to prevent people from copying their application onto
> another device, as their application is not free.  The other thing you
> don't seem to consider is where most of this "Free" software comes from,
> it comes largely from companies like Nokia, IBM, Novell, Google, who
> employ the developers that write the "Free" software, so in large part it
> is "Free" to everyone else because those companies already paid someone to
> write it.  Now there are also some developers who work on this stuff in
> their spare time, but it is because they want to, and they make it "Free"
> because they want to, largely for bragging rights, not because they expect
> some "Global Alliance" to pop up and pay them for it.  If some "Global
> Alliance" were to start sueing companies to make them start paying every
> open source developer that worked on the Linux kernel, embedded Linux
> products would quickly disappear from the marketplace to be replaced by
> WindowsCE, and VxWorks products, as it would be cheaper and easier to pay
> the licensing fees for those commercial operating systems than to wade
> through the thousands of people who worked on Linux.  Do yourself and us a
> favor, and go read The Cathedral and Bazaar by Eric Raymond, if you don't
> want to buy the book, you can read it online here in several different
> languages:
> 
> http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
> 
> It explains in excrcuating detail the reasons and economics involved in
> Open Source Software.  After reading this, you should understand that
> having Linux and other Open Source software packages in as many diverse
> devices as possible is "A Good Thing"(tm).  The alternative is going back
> to the completely closed world as it was before Linux, and much less open
> software for everyone.
> 
> Ed Okerson
> 

Yes, now take that whole idea of hardware locks and extend it to the
motherboard you use in your computer and you can see why people could be
understandably upset.  

I'm not leaning one way or the other in this email, I'm just pointing
out that this is the thin edge of the sword and could quite possibly
grow into a huge problem.