Jim Driscoll's Blog

Open Source Archives

OSI Mailing lists

Did you know that the Open Source Initiative, aka the OSI, has a mailing list to discuss license issues?

Neither did I, until a couple of months ago.

So, if you're the kind of person who likes to watch sausage being made, or you're just an amateur fan of the Open Source license process, go check it out:

To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email to license-discuss-subscribe@opensource.org

The original pointer on the OSI site is here. It's a little hard to find without a full read of the site, so I thought I'd help point interested people in that direction.

So what's discussed on this list? Well, remember that in order for a license to be called Open Source, that license needs to be approved by the OSI's directors. This list acts as a group of advisors to the OSI (in classic FOSS fasion, you get a voice by just showing up and making sense).

Currently, it's a little slow, so it's a perfect time to sign up - there isn't any current crisis that's driving email traffic.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Everything Free (as in Beer)

And for those of you who are wondering why we just don't go and do it already, I'd like to mention a few of the things that make this harder than just shoving something out the door. First, if you're a shareholder, or just someone who likes us, you'll be happy to hear that we're not looking at doing anything rash - we're seriously looking at all the various ways that we would generate revenue, and making sure that this actually works - Project GlassFish and OpenSolaris are just two things we've already done, but some of our other products require different approaches. Also, we've got alot of third party code in our products. Software's a complex business, and almost noone writes everything from scratch anymore, whether that's a closed source or open source project. And with closed source products, that means lots of tricky licenses. Getting the third party stuff from Solaris approved has been a maze of lawyers - GlassFish was easier, since we wrote almost all the code ourselves, with the exception of some code from IBM, a bunch of Open Source projects, and now Oracle's codebase. Lastly, moving large engineering organizations is hard - while many of the engineers inside Sun are really excited that we're moving in this direction, others have never worked in Open Source, and have lots of questions (part of my job is getting them answers).

It's going to be a really exciting year - I can't wait to see what it brings.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.