Category Open Source

Free/Libre Open Source Software

Distinguishing Patents and Copyright

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Tony Stanco formulated a clear distinction between patents and copyright:

Copyright provides exclusive plenary rights to the owner. Patents provide the owner only with the right to exclude others. I think the distinction was grounded in the fact that it would be hard to conflict with someone else’s copyright in an original work (which usually stood alone), while complex, interrelated processes/machines could easily involve multiple and conflicting patents. As a result, patents are only negative rights and a person’s exploitation of a particular patent in subject to the non existence of conflicting patent(s).

It’s a nice conclusion in a long discussion.

Session at LOTS, the 'Swiss LinuxTag'

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

ZZ/OSS CEO Sandro Zic will present a session about Free Software in the Knowledge Society at the first LOTS event, a kind of Swiss LinuxTag.

Come to Bern at February 18th and hear about the following:

This talk will concentrate on an often neglected aspect that the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community introduced to society: A new organizational form of knowledge work in networks of excellence. Due to the fact that FOSS developers and projects act in distributed and heterogenous knowledge networks and furthermore collaborate in self-organised groups, they serve as the prototype elements of the emerging Knowledge Society.

Sandro has presented this talk at LinuxTag 2003 – but don’t expect it to be the same, because the presentation style is interactive, with Sandro discussing most of the aspects with the audience. Thus, the session itself is a show case of impulsive knowledge work inspired by the spirit of the FOSS community.

Will We be Sued?

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

… asks Larry Rosen on the mailinglist of the Open Source Initiative and answers:

Of course we disclaim most warranties and liability in our licenses. Why should we willingly accept potential liability when we give our software away for free? Despite what our licenses say, however, we are subject to local laws relating to gross negligence and fraud. As a matter of public policy in many civilized jurisdictions, we can’t recklessly distribute damaging software to consumers and expect to get away with it.

So we should treat free software businesses as real businesses. Behave professionally and ethically in all our intellectual property transactions. The chances of being sued when we do that are slim to none. But it is wise
to put some money into your bank account just in case you need to hire a lawyer to answer all your questions.

In Germany, you are always reliable for the software you are selling to your customers.

If you really need to go to a lawyer, you should know what you want or need before you go there. Your lawyer is only as good as you are self-aware of your case.

The best thing you can do, is not to do any businesses with customers you sense that they act strange, overdemanding, insidious. If you do not feel good, don’t do it. Well, often you cannot afford sending away customers, then make sure you have enough money on your bank account, just as Larry Rosen proposes.

via license-discuss@opensource.org

If Linux were BSD …

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

> >If Linux were BSD there would be no suit, simply because there would
> >be no competition.
>
> I agree wholeheartedly with this point. And there wouldn’t be thousands
> of volunteers if they thought they were providing free labor for
> others, particularly development houses that then released products
> only for the Windows platform. Fortunately, we’re not in that
> dimension.

I hadn’t thought of that. That might be part of the reason why the GPL-based projects are so much larger than the BSD-based projects.

via license-discuss@opensource.org

Update: Zak has commented on the “If Linux were BSD” thesis. He pointed out that there are many non-GPL projects just as “big” as well known GPL projects. This is a remarkable note by Zak, considering that he works at MySQL AB, whose Database is GPLed and itself one of the “big” FOSS projects.

These kinds of discussions remind me of ideologic discussions during the cold war: is capitalism better then communism? Today, now that the cold war is over, we realize that beyond the east/west antagonism, many problems have been hidden specific to a single country or area.

Ideologic discussions that try to create a linkage between how “big” a FOSS project is and the license it adopted, tend to move our attention away from the real problems the FOSS community has.

Web Services a Thread to GPL?

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The OSI mailinglist has a discussion going on how a Corba interface to a GPL application can circumvent the derived work clause.

I am concerned whether a Corba interface can be used by non-free software to
circumvent the freedoms and requirements of the GPL license. […] A proprietary vendor could create non-free software that functionally would amount to a derived work, without actually making a derived work within the meaning of copyright law. Would this break the spirit of the GPL while complying with its terms, hence not be enforcable under copyright law?

As I understand, this discussion is in fact about any service aka RPC API like SOAP, XML-RPC. Hence, the essential question is whether Web Services form a potential thread to the GPL.

UKUUG: Free and Open Source Software in the Health Service

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I was interested in learning about an area of software engineering that I have not dealt with yet, hence I attended Anand Ramkissoon’s talk Free and Open Source Software in the Health Service.

Anand outlined the history of medical lab software:

In the 1980s: various in house systems have been built, which were
– well specified
– unique to specialism
– unique to individual lab
– constrained by hardware
– not portable
– driven by enthusiasm with no budget

Then, in the 1990s, commercial systems became available that descended from in house systems. Their characteristics:
– mainly multi specialism
– mainframe based
– written to a simplistic specification awkwardly extended
– quality could be higher

Since 2000 and onward, we see the death of in house systems. The Y2K compliance killed off the last in house systems. Also, a retreat from strategic involvement in specification by the medical labs can be observed, which is to Anands oppinion “a huge mistake”. Another characteristic of the current situation is the commercial lock-in, mainly due to proprietary data formats. In this regard, the medical labs have a lack of power in negotiations, because the main companies simply refuse to port old data, allthough it is a requirement by the labs. And the vednors refuse even if there are no technical constraints. Hence, the buyers have to believe it, because they have no influence in the development process

Anands alarming general statement is that “the quality of software currently used in UK labs is poor, absolutely poor”. The reasons are that there is virtually no competition with 3 different software systems in the UK, and globally not many more. Why are there not more vendors, he asked himself? And answered: There’s no balance of power in the market and the software is hard to specify as it requires detailed knowledge.

The reality is that people at health services invest an awfull lot amount of time to clean up after the software. This situation is paired with the counter-productive philosophy in higher and middle management of health services, that investing in new technologies is only possible when employees are laid off.

In summary, the health services in the UK, maybe even world-wide, and especially the medical labs are currently in the phase of vendor lock-in (sounds familiar to me when thinking of the general history of FOSS). Consequently, Anand started the project “Ganesh” to find a common standard for data interoperability, as well as developing an Open Source reference implementation.

The aims of the project “Ganesh”:
– portability of databases, extracts and records
– global specimen identifiers
– not an obvious idea to medical houses
– vertical processes
– sepcimen centred: log, aliquot, test, refer, report, validate, comment, authorise, store, discard
– horizontal processes
– “back room”, QA, QC, workload measurement, global test QA
– modular extensible

Anand, good luck!

UKUUG: I'm there

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Just arrived at UKUUG Linux 2003 conference in Edinburgh. I intend to blog some of the sessions I will attend. The first one will be Jon’s talk. So keep coming back to my blog because I will add some reports from time to time, until the conference closes on Sunday.

Upon registration, I of course received the famous conference bag with many sponsor ads. To my suprise, I also found a printed copy of a Samba 3.0 How-To. Good idea, thanks!

Fortunately, I had some time to do some sight-seeing in Edinburgh yesterday, which is – of course – a great city, as I have now been able to experience on my own.

As far as I have seen, the UKUUG conference Web site does not provide trackback links for each session – maybe next time for the winter conference? Then bloggers could reference single sessions. Apropos conferences and trackbacks: O’Reilly’s OSCON Web site provided trackback links, so maybe it will become a common place soon for any conference Web site – which would really make sense.