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Free as in Freedom

Episode 0x0E: Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement

26 April 2011

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Summary

This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

This show was released on Tuesday 26 April 2011; its running time is 01:02:48.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)
This show is Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)

Segment 1 (03:48)

Richard Fontana's slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)
Bradley was live-denting Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)
Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on identi.ca. (04:30)
Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)
Fontana pointed out that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how Free Software is completely compatible with many business models. (12:30)
Fontana pointed out that many of the relationships between companies in Free software have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)
In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving Josh Berkus credit for the phrase throw code over the wall, a phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)

Segment 2 (48:25)

Fontana made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity to FLOSS. (50:33)
Fontana noted later on identica that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement problem. (54:48)
Bradley mentioned the 60 Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI). (55:30)
Fontana now talking about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that Fontana didn't mention Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)
Bradley was glad that Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too easily forgiven business models on the edges of software freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)

Send feedback and comments on the oggcast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following @faif on identi.ca.

Tags: faif, GNU, licensing, non-profit, Richard Fontana

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