I have just got back from the GOVIS Open Source seminar.
http://www.govis.org.nz/oss2006/oss2006.htm
There were a lot of government IT managers there.
One of the speakers was the author of this paper.
At the time I had just spent the last day and night cut off from the
internet and had not heard what was going down.
Just before the seminar at the venue I was getting a coffee and got
chatting to the guy who wrote said document and when he heard I was one
of the OSS errrm cadre he started to act very defensive about his document.
It turns out that he has discovered what the consequences of raising the
displeasure of the OSS community. Apparently he had over 300 emails in
his inbox.
(I would think that a few of them would be a bit eeerrm flamey :-) )
He has been accused of being a MS flunkey on Slashdot,Groklaw and even
in parliament.
At this talk he went to extreme lengths to ensure his audience that he
was not anti-OSS and when I considered his demeanour later he seemed beaten.
I felt sorry for him. FWIW I don't think that any of the "big boys" at
that seminar (ACC, IRD etc) were swayed by any of the talk of
"infection" as most of them don't distribute software so it doesn't
apply. However I did challenge him on his recommendation to completely
dismiss OSS if in doubt. He did concede the point that BSD style
licences should be OK.
I think that his implication that OSS use exposes an organisation to
extra fault risk is dodgey though and I regret that I hadn't read ./
before going to the seminar.
Regards,
Zane
Steve Holdoway wrote:
This piece was brought to my attention by /. this morning. What it's a
piece of, I'm not too sure. IMO Chapmann Tripp should be shot for using
such inflammatory language, but I suppose that without any licenses to
write, they'd be going out of business. Altruism isn't a word they
understand in this context, I take it.
Some of the highlights:
"Understanding the Infectious Effects of Open Source Licences" - so
they're all bad for you then?
"64 As its standard position, all Development Agreements should prohibit
the use of any open source code in the supplied software." - so how are we
going to develop ( eclipse ), compile ( gcc ), publish ( apache )... it
then?
It's put me off my morning coffee, that's for sure.
http://www.e.govt.nz/policy/open-source/open-source-legal
Steve.
