Excellent points Jack - yes, I didn't make it quit...

2009-07-09T18:37:11.993-07:00

Excellent points Jack - yes, I didn't make it quite as clear as I would have liked in those first couple of paragraphs.

I've updated the post to reflect the fact that I think Matt's thoughts are one aspect of why OSS licensing is less of an issue now, with the innersourcing piece I referred to as another reason.

I don't think you and Matt are talking about the s...

2009-07-06T16:58:55.377-07:00

I don't think you and Matt are talking about the same things. I'm pretty sure Matt doesn't even care about "using the approaches of Open Source in [internal] projects": he's on a riff about "Commercial Open Source" development. Conversely, while you do get around to clarifying your area of focus, about mid-post, your lead in, understood from Matt's perspective, claims agreement with something I think you don't actually agree with.

If I may recast Matt's dictum in other, more widely and recently familiar terms, he might be saying:

"The real value in sub-prime mortgages is no longer the integrity of the lending institution, but rather the house you buy with it."

It's true, houses *are* the point of mortgages. But the value of healthy financial institutions, to the borrower and to the country at large, has lately become quite obvious as well.

FOSS was invented out of the necessity of commercial failures to respect and provide sustaining value. Companies cease to exist if they can't provide sustaining value, if course, and many did over such failures as commercial UNIX. But users also suffered, and the FOSS choice is to avoid that risk.

Whether you use your FOSS to provide web services, run mobile phones, or just play a good game of Star Trek, you lose if your commercial provider goes under. But you at least have a chance of survival, if you depend on FOSS: someone, perhaps even you, can and may pick it up and run with it.

And even within a closed ecosystem, this can be valuable. The license isn't so hard to choose, but it still matters, it's still there even if implicitly. If you think projects and subgroups and divisions and sectors of commercial companies or government agencies never fail, you really need to spend more time in those area! And when they fail, the code, history, discussions, bug base, and other related artifacts remain crucial to successful continuation.

Comments on ™: The Red Herring of Open Source Licensing

Excellent points Jack - yes, I didn't make it quit...

I don't think you and Matt are talking about the s...