[OpenIndiana-discuss] "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[Jan Owoc]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:30 AM, Open Indiana <openindiana at out-side.nl> wrote:
> It is a true nightmare that the hard work of a lot of volunteers and the
> people of the old Sun company dies because it has been sucked empty by the
> commercial snakes. How Is it possible that companies can take
> opensource-code, wrap a commercial GUI around it, close/disable most of the
> opensource features and then sell it as a unique product?

In the Free Software world there are two approaches to licensing:

A) copyleft -> if you use my code, you legally must make it available.
If you don't want to give back, you will likely avoid my code entirely
and write your own.

B) permissive (non-copyleft) -> use my code for whatever purpose you
want. You are more likely to use my code if you have the choice
whether or not to give back, but I may never see changes/improvements.

The GNU Project argues (almost) everything should be licensed as "A".
The *BSDs argue (almost) everything should be licensed as "B". The
CDDL is somewhere in between.

NB: just because you are using a copyleft license still doesn't mean
the people using your code must work with you; they could create a
fork and ignore you, only publishing the code as a whole when they
have a finished product (apparently Android was doing this with the
Linux kernel). Using a permissive license almost guarantees you'll
never see code back (I wonder how much OSX gave back to BSD?).

I don't know of a free software license that would require that
downstream vendors cooperate with you. The only way is to have a
charismatic individual who will talk with the vendor's execs and
convince them that it's in our mutual best interest to cooperate.


> The main question now are:
> Who wants to be the President?
> Do we want to start a sort of election?
> Who wants to lead this project through the battlefield?

Was there ever an election to the OI Governing Council, or has the
document not been updated?
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Human+Resources


Jan