Is open source really open? : Whiteboard videos : ZDNet Asia

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Is open source really open?

Monday, May 21 2007 03:17 PM

While three main open-source organizations decide whether they can get along, the software they each endorse is not cross-pollenatable.

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Today, we're going to talk about open-source software and how open is it really. Is it really open? Open-source software, well, actually as it turns out, there are all different kinds of open-source software and the center of gravity for open-source software are three different organizations.

One of them is the OSI or the Open-Source Initiative. Another one is the OSDL, Open Source Development Labs. And the third one is the Free Software Foundation. Now, each of these organizations have different leaders. The OSI is run by a guy named Russ Nelson and he recently got himself into a whole lot of hot water by misbehavior on the Internet, we'll just say. OSDL is run by a guy named Stuart Cohen and Stuart Cohen likes to go out there and talk about how we need to bring open-source up to speed for businesses for the most part. Free Software Foundation is run by Richard Stallman.

Now, you would think that all of these organizations have the same belief when it comes to open-source and you would think that the open-source software that each of them endorses is cross-pollinatable. But it's not. Is cross-pollinatable a word, I don't know. Well, as it turns out, you have one kind of license coming out of the Free Software Foundation that's known as the GNU General Public License. We'll call it the GPL, okay, and Richard Stallman believes that patents and software don't mix. But coming out of the OSI, there are at least 58 different licenses and I'm just going to carve it up like this and as it turns out, you cannot intermingle anyone of these. Or maybe you can intermingle some, but for most of the part, they're not interminglable, okay.

What ends up happening is that software developed here for example for Sun's OpenSolaris, which uses the cuddle license, cuddle like (grrrrrrr), cuddle. You can't use that in conjunction with the Mozilla Public License and certainly, you can't take any of these licenses and cross pollinate them with GPL. Now Stuart Cohen is trying to figure out this whole mess and figure out how we can bring the entire open-source world together. But he is having his challenges because the people who run this organization don't get along with people who run this organization.

So class, what's the moral of the story? Well, as it turns out open-source software just isn't as open as we'd like it to be, which means that when you're working with open-source software, you need to read the fine print.

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