This Space for Rent

It’s the Do What I Mean initiative!

The Register has published an article that's, indirectly, about the conflict between the Open Source®™© Initiative, a derivative of the Mozilla license, and an amusing interpretation of OSI's definition of Open Source. The offending product (SugarCRM) ships under a Mozilla-derived license which, in the grand tradition of modern software licenses, is a twisty maze of legal language all alike, but which looks like it's simply a super-bloated version of the traditional attributiondamnit! Berkeley license. And therein lies the conflict; there's a large subset of the free software world that loathes the idea of having to credit the original owner of the software, and that subset is generously represented in the groups that the OSI is affiliated with.

SugarCRM is released under an attributiondamnit! license, which isn't approved by the OSI. So, since it's simply free software and not Open Source™©®, it has been shuffled off to the proprietary software ghetto in r*dh*tville.

In a sane world, this sort of idiocy would result in much finger-pointing and laughing. But this isn't a sane world; this is a world where you can copyright the term 'Open Source™®©', wrap a certification agency around it, and provide an supply of board seats for your friends and business partners. So it becomes important to have an official Open Source©™® stamp that you can apply to software and to have a group of people interpreting the requirements, because if they could just check themselves off against a list there'd be no need for your certification agency.

*roll eyes*

I'll stick with releasing free software under a Berkeley-style attributiondamnit! license. It's pretty trivial to credit the original authors of a program (manpages can ship with an AUTHOR section, when you're writing a HOWTO it's pretty simple to write a paragraph saying that the code was written by so-and-so, and if you're writing a gui'ed program it's just another string in the [help] -> [about] box. (I'd mention the thrice-damned *nf* program that the FSF loves, but they're one of the organizations that loathes the attributiondamnit clause, so it's not likely that they'll ever run into that license constraint,)) and I'm selfish in that I want the credit for my work to go to me instead of the corporation that's packaging it up.