OSI Report for 2008 Week 10
This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 9th to 15th, 2008.
This Week
This was my first week of real activity in 2008 (except for my attendance of the March 2008 OSI face-to-face meeting.)
My primary activities were embarrassingly few. I worked with Alolita Sharma and Andrew C. [...]
Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto
Most regular readers of this blog are familiar with the Mozilla Manifesto and with the work that the Mozilla Corporation undertakes to advance the manifesto. It is good work. Actually, it is great work from a great community of people. However, the corporation focuses most on Firefox and the related software and communities. The manifesto [...]
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Links for "Understanding Free Software and Open Source Licensing" attendees
I gave an ad hoc presentation on the last day of the International PHP Conference. During the presentation, I mentioned a few resources, which I have listed below:
The Free Software Foundation Website
The Free Software Definition
List of Approved Free Software Licenses
The Open Source Initiative Website
The Open Source Definition
List of Approved Open Source Licenses
The Software Freedom Law [...]
An Event to Help NGOs Grok Free Software
The Free Software Foundation Europe and M6-IT are presenting a one day event called "Free Software as a Social Innovation" at The Hub in London on the 2nd of November. The event is focused on helping NGOs learn more about Free Software.
Spaces are limited and people with little or no experience of Free Software and [...]
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Don't get pwn3d: Why Professionalism Matters In Community Discussions
Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.
For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.
While both [...]
Discuss *and* participate
Matt Asay posted some of his thoughts on the second draft of version three of the GPL.
It is good that Matt is providing rapid feedback on the new draft, after all the GPL v3 drafting process relies on community participation.
It is less good that Matt doesn't direct people to the FSF GPL v3 site or [...]
Barcelona to host the 3rd Intl. Conference on the GPL v3
The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.
Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free [...]
"Guerilla Evangelism: Opening Closed Environments" talk at EuroOSCON
At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don't remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.
The [...]
About Zak Greant: Bio and Background
Hi! My name is Zak Greant and I've tired of writing things in the third person (at least for today.)
I own a strategic consultancy called Foo Associates – we help technology organizations adapt to and thrive on the electronic frontier. We're a tiny shop, but we've got great clients (like eZ Systems AS and the [...]
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This is a stick up! Hand over your copyright!
Copyright assignment (the practice of asking contributors to a project to assign their copyright to the project owner) always makes me a bit uncomfortable.
From a business perspective, holding all of the copyright for your products provides important advantages (usually ones that relates to making money or managing risk).
From a normal human perspective, it sucks to [...]
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