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Free as in Freedom
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Episode 0x1E: Our Non-Profits Considered
16 December 2011
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oggmp3Summary
Karen and Bradley discuss recent debates about the value of non-profit organizations for Free Software.
This show was released on Friday 16 December 2011; its running time is 00:44:33.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:34)
- Fontana (and other Red Hat employees) pointed out some imprecision in what Bradley said in Episode 0x1D about Debian non-free. (01:07)
- A call for participation has been announced for the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012. Please submit a proposal by 30 December 2011 (04:30)
- A recent debate about non-profits started, initiated by a blog post called Apache Considered Harmful. (12:55)
- Karen and Bradley briefly mentioned that some now believe that Considered Harmful Considered Harmful (13:16)
- A long thread on this issue occurred on the FLOSS Foundations mailing list (13:45)
- Bradley made an official Conservancy Blog post about the value of non-profits for Free Software (14:17)
- Sourceforge became proprietary software in 2001, as is well-described in this by The Sourceforge proprietarization debacle is well described in an article by Loïc Dachary. (19:19)
- Bradley mentioned FaiFCast Episode 0x11, which discussed the OpenOffice.org/Apache/LibreOffice situation. (44:35)
- Bradley pointed out that this debate conflates a lot of different
issues, and tried to list all the conflated questions here:
- Should a non-profit home decide what technical infrastructure is used for a software freedom project? And if so, what should it be?
- If the projects doesn't provide technological services, should non-profits allow their projects to rely on for-profits for technological or other services?
- Should a non-profit home set political and social positions that must be followed by the projects? If so, how strictly should they be enforced?
- Should copyrights be held by the non-profit home of the project, or with the developers, or a mix of the two?
- Should the non-profit dictate licensing requirements on the project? If so, how many licenses are ok?
- Should a non-profit dictate strict copyright provenance requirements on their projects? If not, should the non-profit at least provide guidelines and recommendations?
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