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• Historically, foundations were designed to bring transparency and governance to projects, not just fundraise or pay maintainers |
• Open source foundations have become valuable entities that are now subject to taxation and regulatory scrutiny |
• Jim Zemlin streamlined the process of creating new foundations through his work at OSDL |
• Comparing different open source foundations (FSF, Software Freedom Law Center, Eclipse, Apache) |
• Discussion of Eclipse's origins as a competitive move by IBM against Sun |
• Characteristics of various foundations: FSF's restrictive approach, Apache's developer-driven governance |
• Disparities in what foundations offer to projects: support for marketing, PR, and fundraising |
• Importance of separating project governance from institutional governance |
• Future of open source: potential need for umbrella foundations that are less involved in projects, using tools like GitHub instead of hosting own development environments |
• Concerns about creating numerous foundations and potential tax issues |
• Definition of an "umbrella" foundation and its implications |
• Pros and cons of joining an existing umbrella foundation |
• Copyright aggregation and its role in protecting open source projects |
• Importance of contributor agreements and long-term legal viability |
• Challenges of establishing provenance for open source contributions |
• Tension between short-term sustainability and long-term legal protection |
• The GPL's legal challenges and the potential for a formal court challenge |
• The difficulties in enforcing open-source licenses across complex software stacks |
• The trade-offs between individual project maintainers' rights and contributors' rights |
• The influence of money on open-source projects and the motivations behind decisions |
• The evolution of governance models, including BDFL, consensus, and foundation-based approaches |
• The long-term viability of open-source software and its potential for continued growth |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We talk about open source sustainability on this show, it's a really hot topic now... But you've been working on open source sustainability I think maybe before it was called open source, so why don't you give us some of that kind of history and back-story through the lens of sustainability? |
**Danese Cooper:** Sure. So when I got into open source, it was just kind of the beginning of companies caring about open source, and there was an early vanguard of companies that either they already kind of had open source as part of their history, although maybe it was called 'free software' when that started, or the... |
And then there were up and coming companies like Red Hat, that were just starting out, and were tiny, but were so deeply based on open source that they cared a great deal, and they were building alliances all the time... So that's sort of the point at which I came in. |
It's important to say that there was a good 15-18 years of people developing software in this way, that would be called the modern era... Because we all know that in the early, early, early days of computing everybody shared everything, because it was just a hobby, and they had to share everything because it was the on... |
\[03:50\] The point at which that all changed has been classically tied to the Homebrew Computer Club and Bill Gates' realization that he wanted to charge for essentially access to the sources, although that's not how he framed it. But he wanted to start selling non-source-accessible executables, and he made a very suc... |
In those days, the corporations wanted in on the marketing lift of the coining of the term 'open source'. Tim had that famous meeting and they came up with that cool term, and then he used his media arm to make that term interesting to people, and almost immediately there were people that just wanted to take advantage ... |
Some existing projects that had been around a long time and were pretty successful all of a sudden had to deal with that, the hype factor. People were code dumping, for instance, at Apache. Apache had to change its license and also some of its practices to make sure that people got it, that they didn't have access to t... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can we talk a little bit about just the media lift part of it of how he made sure that people were using the term open source? Because I think people don't necessarily know about that. |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, I don't think he enforced anything. It was sort of the anti-free software movement, if you will, and I don't mean that in the sense that they were pitting themselves against free software; I mean they were using different tactics. Tim and others like him saw amazing software coming out of the f... |
Tim saw an opportunity to reframe the whole thing under a new term that, first of all, didn't have the inherent ambiguity of 'free', because in English 'free' means both liberty and gratis, and that was a problem, because people got them confused. Free as in gratis doesn't necessarily lend value to the endeavor, free a... |
So he came up with the term, and then there was a Perl conference that was pretty successful, that he'd been running for a while, and he started it around the time that there was a lot of contention in the Perl community because of the work of ActiveState to creative a Windows-native version of Perl, which felt like cr... |
\[08:06\] He changed that to be the first open source conference, OSCON, and invited everybody, and used the fact that the publishing industry gave him disposable income to push memes to get more people thinking about open source; he wrote extensively about it. His blog was well read -- actually, pre-blog, his writings... |
And almost exactly at the same time we started to see the rise of peer-to-peer computing. It was only maybe a year later that the first peer-to-peer conference happened, which was also one of his... That was both attempting to address some social ills, which is interesting, given the separation or apparent separation b... |
Famously, there were early music sharing platforms that the music industry really disliked, and one of the really successful ones was Gnutella. Gnutella was written by a bunch of people who saw the central architecture of the first experiments in music sharing and decided that a massively decentralized architecture was... |
Almost immediately, Larry Lessig showed up and started talking about copyright problems, and the confluence of the change in the music industry and the attempted change in copyright law and open source - they all converged at the same moment. So for a really long time there, every open source conference had a huge comp... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting. So this is happening around the same time that Linux was also on the rise, so before we kind of leave this era, one question that I have is that -- one of the things that I have to talk about a lot right now is how there are a million reasons why people contribute to open source, and leg... |
**Danese Cooper:** \[11:48\] You know, I don't remember that that's why Linus chose the license. I think Linus chose the GNU license because it was the only one he knew. Richard Stallman did a lot of running around, talking to universities about why freedom was important, and his style is very sympathetic to people of ... |
But the BSD project, which was the permissive licensing that Bill Joy invented, happened almost -- well, now I'm in trouble, because MIT was working at almost the same thing at almost the same time... But permissive licensing dates from almost the same era as the free software licensing, and the projects pre-date the p... |
In the early days of corporate involvement in open source, the very first corporate project was Mozilla, and Netscape at the time was considered a big company; not as big as IBM, but they had a pocket and they were worried when they constructed their project. They did it as a Hail Mary, because Microsoft had just destr... |
So Mozilla, among other things, did a Hail Mary and put their client software that was competitive with IE as open source, thinking that that would drive adoption and keep them alive. And it worked, right? But they were so worried that people would not feel comfortable as individual contributors, because at that time m... |
The next thing that happened was they got a new owner, and the new owner didn't like the way that open source worked - this was AOL - so they were gonna pull the plug, because they couldn't get their own stuff in fast enough, and because the community vetting process was frustrating to them. |
We were in the middle of that lawsuit, and Sun decided that it couldn't afford to have that browser go away, and so another Hail Mary thing happened where IBM and Sun's lawyers went and talked to AOL and convinced them to release the IP into a foundation, and then to give a little bit of funding; Sun and IBM each also ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Interesting. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You were talking about copyleft versus permissive licensing, that it started around the same time... How deliberate - when you're saying things like "permissive licensing was useful for driving adoption, and still is today", how deliberate were things like the idea that copyleft could prevent anybody ... |
**Danese Cooper:** \[16:13\] You know that those licenses, even today, all but the AGPL, are still trigger on distribution of the code. People don't really distribute code so much anymore, because now we have software as a service, so as the pendulum swings back and forth between client server and peer-to-peer - we're ... |
Back in the day, the free software people really genuinely felt that they had to compel anyone who touched the code to give back changes. When we were explaining licensing to corporations, we used to say "For a free software person, the worst thing that could happen is a piece of code gets used in a non-free way, and f... |
The Apache people were like "Look, we would much rather have gifts of code that people wanna give us - they're gonna be higher quality than gifts of code that people have to give us, and they're gonna do the least they must in order to fulfill that obligation", right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. |
**Danese Cooper:** But I think that the free software people were absolutely coming from a place of trying to push the right behaviors, they were just using the stick instead of the carrot. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. I hear it uses this example now of "Well, if only everybody had been GPL, then you wouldn't have this problem of people using and not contributing back", because that was the point, but nobody wanted to use that license. |
**Danese Cooper:** But I don't think that's true... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I agree, yes. |
**Danese Cooper:** ...because now we have software as a service and they don't have to anymore. On that model, we would have almost no contributions now, because nobody would be required to do it. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** ...or adoption. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, and if adoption of the software is one of the ways that you attract contributors, then anything that harms the adoption of the software is going to lead to a lack of contributors, especially if this other legal mechanism isn't even there. |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. I mean, when WebSphere, which was just Apache's web server wrapped by IBM and turned into a product which is legal under permissive licensing - when that happened, the whole free software movement was getting out their popcorn, because they thought that it was gonna fail, or it was gonna show ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It seems like there is a concern on the free software side of people using the software and not contributing back, and there's definitely the view now, too -- I think you've described it before as like people worried about freeloaders, or whatever... \[laughs\] How has that changed over time, because... |
**Danese Cooper:** \[20:12\] Right. Well, I think that a lot of the enforcement activities that the Free Software Foundation engages in are around people who use the software and extend it, and don't give back their interesting extensions. That's because they have curiosity about how people are using it, and they want ... |
I don't know if you guys are old enough to remember the Nordstrom chocolate chip cookie, but... |
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