Pillars Of FOSS

Presented by Pia Waugh (VP of Linux Australia) this talk looked at the perceptions people have about open source, she asked the audience what single thing they thought most strongly represented the OSS movement, there were various but obvious suggestions, free, open, sharing etc etc, but Pia went on to outline the points she thought underpinned it.

She discussed the regular suspects: Source, Community, Knowledge, but the one that seemed slightly out there but which she emphasised as important was commerce, ie the need to make FOSS palateable enough to business so that they adopt it, and the need to educate them on how they can embrace it without being too paranoid about issues like support and IP.

There was some interesting debate about the naming of the movement, some voiced the opinion that 'Free' was scary and unfamiliar to corporates, it was pointed out that this was how the open-source name came about as an alternative to the earlier free-software, the "free as in freedom, not free as in beer" quote was roundly dismissed as not being particularly useful as a means of explaining the philosophy.

Pia mentioned how she beleives the problem of comphrension of FOSS is further exacberated when people present tools like open-office to existing users of say ms-office claiming that it is a fully fledged replacement for it and that it will do all they desire. This is not true in many cases and leads people new to FOSS tools to dismiss or be wary of others. Much better to simply explain the benefits of the FOSS alternative.

There was a lot of talk also about software patents, this is a topic that fires people up. The reccomendation is that you should not bother investigating pending patent collisions with a tool you may be developing, partly because you can never really confirm it 100%, patent lawyers will only really compare your claim against other existing ones you point out to them (theyre not gonna crawl all patents), the whole issue and strength of s/w patents is weak at best, and sometimes at certain stages of the patent process the content of claims is not available to inspect anyway.

But the biggest issue is that in the states if you are shown to have searched for competing patents and someone takes you to court over an infringment where they have a patent you didnt identify you wil be liable for a doubling or more of the infringement penalty just because you had carried out a search.

Ignorance is bliss in this regard and we heard that it is actually the official policy of some big s/w houses.

See Also: OSDC 2006 | Web Development | Notes Index

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