Meet Mark Radcliffe: The man who rules open source law As one of his clients told us, "Mark Radcliffe is the law when it comes to open source software." Radcliffe, an attorney at giant DLA Piper, has lurked behind some of the most important shifts in the open source world over the past few years. He helped Sun Microsystems open source the Solaris operating system, developing Sun's …
"some of the open source world's most rabid^H^H^H^H^H vocal members went after his attribution licenses"
Yet again Vance shows himself to be reasonably-well researched but less than objective on the subject of Linux.
No, Mr Vance, those that don't share your opinion aren't necessarily "rabid".
In a commodity market, brand is of paramount importance - consider why Heinz commands the lion's share of the baked bean market. Linux, BSD, etc are commodity markets.
CPAL seems like a reasonable way forward in principal in the present world. But FLOSS licences need to be as future-proof as possible: the question of logo attribution needs to be considered carefully, especially while US patents are granted for future products that will force users to actively watch advertising to use said products.
Logos have a psychological impact not shared by simple text; that's why they exist. The OSI is quite right to be cautious about setting any precedent here; that's their job. The question has to be asked: just what is wrong with the present system where developers and corporations are accredited in simple text, anyway?
Remember that logo attribution was an important factor in the XFree/Xorg fork. XFree's subsequent widespread rejection & the shift to Xorg has been a very positive move for the Linux market.
Conrad
Yeah, he certainly does get about a bit. And there was me thinking he was just a very bad and seriously-annoying DJ.
(For a while, MR was my vote for most annoying DJ. Then Chris Moyles came on the scene. Why, oh god why does the BBC employ these worse-than-student-radio morons? Even Nicky Campbell and Chris Evans weren't this bad.)
Maybe Moyles is annoying, but 7million people disagree. Nearly 12% of the current UK population. OK.
Also, a clever feature of modern 'wireless sets' is the option to choose what to listen too. Or there's that magnificent DAB that the BBC seem so intent to spend their TV licence cash upon, with a multitude of channels. And the 'listen again' feature to listen to the ginger headed shouter whenever you choose.
I think this will encourage companies to adopt free and open software.
Let's say company ``A'' is using a prominant piece of software, and they are modifying/enriching the product to better meet their needs, why wouldn't they opt to include their corporate identity to the product? They are a developer/contributor of the product.
Now. Company ``B, C, ...'' sees that this software product really is advantageous, and decides to adopt it. Since A, B, C, ... are competitors in the same market, they'll also want to get their name listed. As adoptors they also contribute, and thus earn equal status with the rest of the contributors.
Further out, once this practice gains the attention of the enterprise market, it will become a thing, to be a contributor of relevent free and open software products. It's a social thing, a publicity thing, and something that would happen anyway should a large organization contribute significantly to the cause.
Ultimately, I think that what will happen with this, is that lots of organization will contribute, exploding the development of free and open software, and instead of full-blown logo saturation (say a two minute logo slide show every time you start the application), it will settle into acknowledgement of contribution, and the right for the company to promote on its own, the status as a free and open software contributor.
That's how I see it.
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