[Autonomo.us] Code for America Open House
If any of you are in the SF Bay Area on the 26th, hit me up for an invitation to the Code for America open house. It's a chance to talk to the 20 Fellows who will be working for the next year on open source software for US cities, as well as rub shoulders with all the other guests. -- Michael R. Bernstein mich...@fandomhome.com signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.autonomo.us http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Autonomo.us] AGPL licensing questions
On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 14:08 +0100, David Roetzel wrote: 3. I based the web design (html, css and some images) on a free template under Creative Commons Attribution license. This is where it gets messy. Again I have no problem with giving attribution, but the original template code is now splattered all over my application, since I use small parts of it in many of my Rails-templates. It is so intertwined with my code now, that it can hardly be seen as seperate. This *is* messy. The right thing to do here (both technically and to reduce your licensing headaches) is to make your app themeable, and use the template to create the default theme, making the theme a legitimately separate work from the app that is a derivative of the CC-BY licensed template. If you maintain this default theme in a separate source tree, and make sure your app works even without a theme (it is probably OK if the un-themed app is horribly ugly, as long as it still works as intended), you should be OK to bundle the theme into your distribution of the app. IANAL, TINLA, etc. I realize that 'make your app themeable' is a non-trivial project, but it has the added advantage of being a major selling point for many app categories (especially if it allows your users to easily preserve their look and feel modifications while upgrading the app to a newer release). - Michael R. Bernstein signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.autonomo.us http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Autonomo.us] Ubuntu is too attached to Canonical -- a bug filed at Launchpad.net
On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 10:49 -0700, Mike Linksvayer wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 08:55, Bradley M. Kuhn bk...@ebb.org wrote: One can always make more money with proprietary software than Free Software Are you serious? An objective and narrow reading of this statement is actually true. Margins on Proprietary software are higher than Free Software. The successful Free Software vendors are in many cases deliberately disrupting the market they target, shrinking its size (in terms of $$$) and taking a larger share of a market with thinner margins, which the more bloated incumbents are ill-suited for. Overall, less money is made. It is only un-true for upstart entrants to those markets that don't have any other reasonable way of entering a pre-existing market with established proprietary vendors. This assumes that the dominant proprietary offerings are actually 'good enough' in some sense, which they usually are. The only other reliable strategy that works for existing markets is entering it from an adjacent one that you dominate (which, obliquely, is one reason new companies frequently try to establish new markets, however small). So in theory, if you dominate one market with a FLOSS product you could enter an adjacent market with a proprietary offering. In this case, Canonical is entering an existing adjacent market, but one that is still relatively new and small and that does not yet have any well-established vendors with high barriers to entry. Canonical could therefore credibly (and profitably) operate U1 as a FAIF service, but is likely keeping U1 proprietary (and thus more profitable) simply because they *can*. - Michael Bernstein signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.autonomo.us http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss
