OSCON Open Source Convention Returned to Portland

By Linda Barney, Barney and Associates

OSCON 2007, the open source conference sponsored by O’Reilly Media, returned to Portland at the end of July. Techies from around the world roamed the Oregon Convention Center – attending OSCON keynote speeches, conference breakout sessions, tutorials, technical talks, exhibits and a number of evening events such as author events, open source awards and parties. Sessions and tutorials were available for Apache, Web Topics, Java, Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, Phython, Ruby, Pthreads, security, products and services. An exhibit hall contained booths showcasing open source products, applications, services and associations.

A one-day conference-within-a-conference called O'Reilly Radar provided an executive-level briefing of new open source or related technologies. The session included technical sessions, discussions of how open source can work with Web 2.0, how companies such as Facebook and the Firefox plug-in ecosystem are using both an open and proprietary (closed) software model, how open source is changing, as well as open source licensing.

What is open source and who controls it?
There were a number of presentations and debates at OSCON about what open source means and who controls it. In his opening keynote speech, Tim O'Reilly (founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc.) stated, “Open source is often presented as an either/or proposition; but in fact, any study of open source and other movements that have sprung from the new social dynamics of Internet-connected communities – such as Web 2.0 collective intelligence applications – shows us that the story is far more complex. Some projects are open source by license, but cathedral-like in their development practices, while others are closed source by license but create new participatory layers that are open and reusable.”

O’Reilly’s view of open source is not shared by all members of the open source community. In the session called “Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era”, Eben Moglen[1] (director, Software Freedom Law Center) sharply disagreed with the term “open source” versus the Free Software Foundation (FSF) definition of “free” software as well as ideas about how open and closed (proprietary) software can coexist.

In a continuation of this exchange of ideas, Matt Asay (VP, Business Development, Alfresco Software) and Mike Olson from Oracle (and the former CEO of Sleepycat, which Oracle acquired) sparred verbally about whether open source is “always better.” Olson indicated that open source is just one tactic and some collaboration between closed (proprietary) communities has provided an open exchange of ideas and innovation. Asay stated, “Unfettered access to source code provides benefits to all users by ensuring ongoing development and innovation.” This means that everyone benefits from the fact that the source code is open because many programmers will enhance a product.

Who should grant open source licenses?
There are a wide number of licenses for open source products available from different licensing bodies including the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Michael Tiemann (vice president, Open Source Affairs, RedHat and current OSI president) stated, “OSI wrote a definition of what it means to be open source, we promote that definition, and that's what the world expects when they see the term mentioned.” The OSI board is increasingly hearing about vendors claiming that their software is open source but when reviewed by OSI, it is determined that the software did not meet the definition of open source.

Tiemann wrote in his blog posting, “Enough is enough. Open source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label.”

Discussion at OSCON made it clear that there is some confusion and disagreement among vendors and developers about what should be allowed in a license, who should be able to grant the license, and how developers at start-up companies developing business applications can comply with an open source license while still being able to sell their software and attract venture capital funding. It was announced that the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) that Socialtext submitted was approved by the OSI, which was a feature requested by some vendors creating business-related open source software applications. It is clear that licensing and the definition of open source is an issue that will continue to be discussed in the open source community for a long time.

Microsoft will submit shared source licenses to OSI for approval
During OSCON, Bill Hilf (Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy) announced that Microsoft will submit its shared source licenses to the OSI for approval. This includes the Microsoft Permissive License, Community License and Reference License. O’Reilly called this event “huge, long-awaited and earthshaking.” Hilf also announced that Microsoft has created a new top-level link at microsoft.com/opensource to bring together all Microsoft’s open source efforts in one place.

Intel creates open source project for its multi-core development software
Intel recently announced that the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB), a popular software C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel (key to any multicore computer), is now available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2) with the runtime exception. A fun presentation by James Reinders (director, Intel Corporation – the guy in the suit) and Intel open source evangelist Dirk Hohndel talked about how open source coding could be used for parallelism with the statement, “Intel TBB, as both an open source and fully supported commercial offering, makes parallelism more accessible for programmers and enables increased application performance on multi-core processors.” A call went out to open source developers to become more actively involved in working on open source code relating to hardware projects.

About the author
Linda Barney is the founder and owner of Barney and Associates, a technical and marketing writing firm. Founded in 1990, Barney and Associates specializes in technical writing, documentation, online help, web content and training. Barney and Associates also provides a wide range of marketing writing services including creating media articles, white papers, data sheets, solution briefs, case studies, web content and reviewer’s guides. Contact Linda at linda@barneyassoc.com.