Stuart Herbert wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 5:42 PM, John Bywater
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Of course public developments should be underwritten by a public
license (and we should continue to demand they are) but it's
probably neither sufficient nor absolutely strictly necessary. At
the same time, there are other equally important tendencies which
we would all benefit from having in general circulation. Open
source doesn't have all the answers, but at least open source is
listening.... I don't have all the answers either, but I've got a
large sheet of paper. :-)
They used to do (maybe still do for all I know) a very interesting
thing in the States back in the 80's, before the FSF and free/open
source software was widely known about. Software written for NASA
(and presumably other federal entities too) was federally owned. When
NASA sold that software on, the company who bought that software
gained full copyright to the software. This freed the software up to
have a longer and more useful life than it otherwise would have had.
A practical example of this is the NQS software that was developed for
NASA in the mid-80's, but which has been popular worldwide thanks to
being put under the GNU GPL after being bought by Monsanto. Because
it was made available as free software, volunteers were able to fix
its many serious bugs, and continue to make it work on newer operating
systems (such as Linux) which simply didn't exist back in the mid-80's.
Thanks for the story.
I guess my point is that there is a strong case for public money being
used to create public software. It's our money after all ... why
shouldn't it be our software too?
I agree. That having been said....
If the purpose of open source is for the source to be open, then it's
quite simple: things should be open source. However, if the purpose of
open source is for worlds to improve, then we may find other things
contribute just as much....
For example, you can arrive at the position of the FSF through
incremental improvements to the juridical concerns of circulating
inscriptions. You can situate the FSF as a point on that line. RMS
doesn't overturn copyright, but rather turns copyright over and writes
something in addition on the back. He does it to improve the circulation
of inscription. He then freely circulates his inscription as an
immutable Value Object, also known as the GPL.
Now, since we possess the capacity freely to circulate our inscriptions
(and since this capability is widely known) today's credit crunched and
market failed world is desperately waiting for some attention to be paid
to the other aspects of supporting worlds with free software (a
semi-pubic proposition). If we care about sharing (if that's the purpose
of open source) we should care just as much about the other well-trodden
aspects of shared software development.
For application layer software, particularly software that supports
intimately the working process of others, we should care about analysis.
We should care about the domain stories, or the actual purpose of any
software. We should care about the model of the domain, and the
Ubiquitous Language it supports amongst multiple stakeholders. These
things could easily be open source of course, but they can't be open
source if they don't firstly exist.
In summary, we can also address sharing as an object of development,
just like RMS did. Having stumbled upon the problem of sharing working
process supports - where the requirements are not immediately at the
finger tips of the software developers, a problem which RMS didn't have
at the start of the GNU project - we are obliged to rework sharing from
the standpoint of the supported domain.
For our own concerns, we have named this problem as Appropriate Software
Clubs.
http://appropriatesoftware.net/foundation/Clubs.html
The corresponding "Volere" analysis of the working process is being
recorded here:
http://desire.appropriatesoftware.net/processes/2/
At the moment it's neither world writeable, nor does it have an open
licence. Both are defects which will have remedies very soon. If you'd
like to be involved in this project, please drop me a line.
Bye for now,
John.
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