Karen and Bradley discuss recent debates about the value of
non-profit organizations for Free Software.
Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:34)
Fontana (and other Red Hat employees) pointed out some imprecision in what
Bradley said in Episode
0x1D about Debian non-free. (01:07)
A call for participation has been
announced for the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012. Please submit a
proposal by 30 December 2011 (04:30)
A recent debate about non-profits started, initiated by a blog post called Apache
Considered Harmful. (12:55)
Karen and Bradley briefly mentioned that some now believe that Considered Harmful Considered Harmful
(13:16)
A long thread on this issue occurred on the FLOSS Foundations mailing list (13:45)
Bradley made an official Conservancy Blog post about the value of non-profits for Free Software (14:17)
Sourceforge became proprietary software in 2001, as is well-described in this
by The Sourceforge
proprietarization debacle is well described in an article by Loïc
Dachary. (19:19)
Bradley mentioned FaiFCast Episode 0x11, which discussed the OpenOffice.org/Apache/LibreOffice
situation. (44:35)
Bradley pointed out that this debate conflates a lot of different issues, and tried to list all the conflated questions here:
Should a non-profit home decide what technical infrastructure is used for a software freedom project? And if so, what should it be?
If the projects doesn't provide technological services, should non-profits allow their projects to rely on for-profits for
technological or other services?
Should a non-profit home set political and social positions that must be followed by the projects? If so, how strictly should they be
enforced?
Should copyrights be held by the non-profit home of the project, or with the developers, or a mix of the two?
Should the non-profit dictate licensing requirements on the project? If so, how many licenses are ok?
Should a non-profit dictate strict copyright provenance requirements on their projects? If not, should the non-profit at least
provide guidelines and recommendations?
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