Today, we're going to talk about open-source software andhow open is it really. Is it really open? Open-source software, well, actuallyas it turns out, there are all different kinds of open-source software and thecenter of gravity for open-source software are three different organizations.
One of them is the OSI or the Open-Source Initiative.Another one is the OSDL, Open Source Development Labs. And the third one is theFree Software Foundation. Now, each of these organizations have differentleaders. The OSI is run by a guy named Russ Nelson and he recently got himselfinto a whole lot of hot water by misbehavior on the Internet, we'll just say.OSDL is run by a guy named Stuart Cohen and Stuart Cohen likes to go out thereand talk about how we need to bring open-source up to speed for businesses forthe most part. Free Software Foundation is run by Richard Stallman.
Now, you would think that all of these organizations havethe same belief when it comes to open-source and you would think that theopen-source software that each of them endorses is cross-pollinatable. But it'snot. Is cross-pollinatable a word, I don't know. Well, as it turns out, youhave one kind of license coming out of the Free Software Foundation that'sknown as the GNU General Public License. We'll call it the GPL, okay, andRichard Stallman believes that patents and software don't mix. But coming outof the OSI, there are at least 58 different licenses and I'm just going tocarve it up like this and as it turns out, you cannot intermingle anyone ofthese. Or maybe you can intermingle some, but for most of the part, they're notinterminglable, okay.
What ends up happening is that software developed here forexample for Sun's OpenSolaris, which uses the cuddle license, cuddle like(grrrrrrr), cuddle. You can't use that in conjunction with the Mozilla PublicLicense and certainly, you can't take any of these licenses and cross pollinatethem with GPL. Now Stuart Cohen is trying to figure out this whole mess andfigure out how we can bring the entire open-source world together. But he ishaving his challenges because the people who run this organization don't getalong with people who run this organization.
So class, what's the moral of the story? Well, as it turnsout open-source software just isn't as open as we'd like it to be, which meansthat when you're working with open-source software, you need to read the fineprint.
