GPL and Related License Adoption Rates

Black Duck led the industry by introducing an accurate depiction of GPLv3, LGPLv3 project adoption and usage in graphical and tabular formats.

For those of you who may not have noticed Black Duck has expanded our Open Source License Resource Center by introducing AGPLv3 adoption and usage. Once again, the numbers displayed are accumulated month-to-month. The data is updated daily and the current month's statistics are to date only.

Tracking AGPL is important because it represents a separate platform for Web and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. It is relatively new, approximately half the age of the GPLv3, but if broadly adopted will expand the reach of FOSS licensing to many places it has not impacted before: Web and SaaS applications, portals, e-commerce and search sites, and others.

It’s worth watching.

What do you think about AGPL as an OSS license?

An open source license that's easy on the conscience (and your cholesterol)

Finally! An open source license that's more interesting than the Beerware License! For the uninitiated, the Beerware License (latest Revision 42) was written by Poul-Henning Kamp, “UNIX guru at large”. This humorous license grants users the right to use Beerware-licensed source code in exchange for buying Kamp a beer (or other such adult beverage) if they should ever meet him at a neighborhood watering hole.

A much more serious open source license in the ExtTLD license. According to Matt Asay at CNET, “The ExtTLD license has some restrictions that might make even Richard Stallman blush.”

Here's why: Software or components under this license cannot be used in connection with the development and manufacture of products that involve animal testing, products whose ingredients might come from testing on animals, or genetically modified organisms involving animal genes.

That means your software engineers can't be involved in animal testing, and neither can your company's products or services. (“Animal products" are defined as “meat, seafood, honey, fur, silk and eggs” -- a vegan’s odium list.) Also explicitly excluded is participation in animal-based sports, such as rodeo riding, and the transport of animals. That means the transportation or haulage sector, and anybody developing satellite navigations systems and applications, is explicitly excluded.

Is the ExtTLD license an open source code license or some strange variant? What’s clear is that it is the healthiest license and easiest on the conscience.

SFLC Publishes Legal Guide on FOSS

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), who describe themselves as a "provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)", today published a very useful in-depth primer that introduces the reader to the legal issues related to FOSS. See it here.

This web-based guide was written by members of SFLC's staff to cover "a variety of legal topics and their practical application to free software development". These topics include copyrights and licensing, organizational structure, patents, and trademarks.

Its a very helpful primer that is potentially helpful to newbies and advanced practitioners alike.

v3 Check-in: First of the Year

One of the high points of the last year in technology was the introduction of GPLv3 and LGPLv3 back on July 28^th, 2007. I thought it was so important I wrote up a v3 status reports on adoption in August, September and October. By my last count in late October, there were 605 GPLv3 and 74 LGPLv3 projects.

The current status of GPL and LGPL v3 adoptions according to Black Duck is 1,191 GPLv3 and 171 LGPLv3 projects. This represents 97% and 131% growth respectively since that late October check-in posting. The current project-license adoption count also shows that GPL represents 87% of the v3 licenses; LGPL represents 13%. Thus, there has not been a discernible shift to LGPL. (Note: For a period of time the LGPL adoption rate superseded GPLv3 adoption. As I explained at the time this did not turn out to be a sustained trend.)

In my 2008 trends blog posting on 12/31/07, I indicated that “GPLv2 will continue to dominate, GPLv3 will grow steadily and the Affero license will be newsworthy”.

If one drills deeper in the data, it turns out that the v3 adoptions growth rate on a month-to-month basis has sharply fallen off. This is probably due to three reasons: (1) The novelty of v3 has worn off, (2) the GNU/Free Software zealots, as early adopters, have run their course, and (3) there is a seasonal factor; like software product introductions, few open source projects are introduced in November and December. Products introductions usually ramp-up in the first quarter of each year – especially in January – and peak in April and May, and September and October, during prime trade show season. But the falloff in v3 adoptions is worth monitoring.

I stand firm in the belief that GPLv3 adoptions will ramp up this year. I think the falloff is a natural part of the software introduction and adoption cycle paralleling product introductions.

Trends of 2008

Each year I summarize the trends for the coming year. These trends are derived from things I know something about and especially from watching Black Duck’s business; talking to customers, partners and analysts; listening to our sales force and reseller channel; and taking note of market feedback and suggestions from Black Duck and other executives, and many others. (Fashion and celebrity trends are not included; wrt these topics I plead ignorance.)

This year I have identified seven (7) trends, or eleven (11) trends – depending on how you count them. I think this is the year of the market segment, so I identify four markets which will emerge in 2008. If you regard them as sub-trends you get 7; if you see them as major trends, you get 11 trends. In either case, there is significant market maturity in the open source arena so trend spotting is being more complex:

1. An increase in the number and magnitude of lawsuits and legal actions. There is no question that the most significant event in the FOSS-world in 2007 was GPLv3. Second most significant is a series of events-- the lawsuits and legal actions brought by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the BusyBox and other GPL software developers.

Simultaneously, Black Duck has seen a significant expansion in our business in 2007 for three reasons: (1) Companies have established and documented the controls necessary to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and have moved from "documentation" to "process improvements." Now they are figuring out how to automate those controls and reduce the cost of compliance. (Black Duck plays a role here as companies take control of their software assets); (2) the market for software compliance will evolve and expand over the coming years as more enforcement actions are taken, and (3) more corporations are thinking beyond compliance and realizing that Black Duck products are ideal for integration into new software development methodologies or the application development lifecycle.

The year 2008 will be the year of compliance and enforcement. It will also be another very strong year for Black Duck as we introduce a new product line expansion that will help software developers early in the application development lifecycle.

2. GPLv2 will continue to dominate, GPLv3 will grow steadily and the Affero license will be newsworthy. The introduction of GPLv3 was in many ways one of the defining events of 2007. In 2008 v3 adoption will continue to increase as more open source projects are released, but v2 will continue to be popular for projects involved with software distribution. It appears that v3 adoption is taking longer than expected because software developers and especially their attorneys have not warmed-up to v3’s new patent provisions.

We also believe that in 2008 the GPLv3 adoption numbers will not be as closely watched. Except for the first year anniversary of the introduction of v3 and lawsuit announcements, this issue will simply fade into the background. We believe that closer attention will be paid to the GNU AGPLv3 (so-called Affero) license, especially with respect to Google's and other on-line services' adoption.

3. VC funding for Open Source Vendors (OSVs) will decline. The US model for VC funding of FOSS projects was to identify an established project with a vibrant community and build the company from there. MySQL was the first big one; this year it will likely go public or be acquired. Many other OSVs followed in 2007 resulting in a significant industry. In 2008, there will be many fewer OSVs created from open source projects. Many of the ventures which were first funded in 2005-2006 will be sold or merged into other entities this year. Open source, however, will be a big part of the software development culture. It will continue to fuel the business models of innovative startups and new ventures, and will become the backbone of enterprise computing.

Another indication of market maturity is manifested on the marketing side as OSVs are finally learning to call themselves as market makers rather than relying on “open source” messaging as the primary go-to-market positioning vehicle. SugarCRM within the CRM market and EnterpriseDB in the database market are two examples of this trend. This will lead in stronger market differentiation for these players who mainstream their messages and result in more VC being invested in these OSV leaders.

4. FOSS use and OSV formations will soar in specific market segments in 2008:

a. Healthcare. A sector that has suffered from cost concerns from its inception will be receptive to open source adoption this year and significant growth in FOSS use. While there are quite a few open source projects in healthcare – such as IBM’s Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure (IHII) and Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (EOHF), both built with an open source framework, and the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) – in 2008 there will be significantly more standalone projects and use of open source in healthcare applications. The issues of reliability and security which have previously stymied its adoption will become a thing of the past. In 2008, the US healthcare sector will become a hotbed of open source software development – albeit on a small scale. 2009 will witness more widespread development efforts.

In the developing world, open source will play a major role in healthcare information systems and will make a big difference.

b. The Worldwide Mobile and Telecommunications Industry. Open source has been used aggressively by ODMs since the mid-1990’s as a way of driving down the cost of development. Embedded Linux and databases were first, and then some open source applications and utilities (such as Log4j) formed the M/T open source stack. Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform, has emerged as a momentum driver, in addition to legal actions involving alleged open source license violations against telecommunications market leaders BT and Verizon.

c. The Government Sector, including Government Contractors. I was amazed to find that at the AFEI (www.afei.gov) Open Source Conference on December 11^th and 12^th, all the attendees referred to open standards as open source. (Bernard Golden of Navica had the same observation.) There are increasingly more federal government software development managers and IT managers who plan to use or adopt open source in 2008. This will drive additional adoption downstream: Among the big contractors, sub-contractors, SMBs (see below), minority businesses, etc.

d. Small-and-Medium Businesses (SMBs) will increase their use of FOSS in large part because it will be integrated into their practice areas by value-added resellers/integrators. Open source projects will also mature to address vertical requirements of SMBs. For example, a point-of-sale solution for dry cleaners is based on the open source OpenBravo ERP.

e. Inter-corporate (multiple large scale enterprises) projects in the US. Corporations working together on open source projects will think about their industry problems and solutions in a much more expansive way. Last year some projects gained significant traction. For example, the pharmaceutical industry has launched Farmavita.net solutions. Going forward, look for more industry collaboration around open source. One vertical ripe for this type of initiative is the auto industry.

5. Open Source adoption, OSV formation and Proprietary/Closed Source Software Maintain Market Share Balance. Many open source projects originated in Europe, such as SuSE in German; Linux and MySQL in Sweden; Mandriva, Zope and Plone in France; Drupal in Belgium; Alfresco in the UK, and others. Several countries like Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and others did not witness growth in open source adoption. This was due in part to the strong local base that Microsoft has established in these countries. In 2008, open source projects and adoption, and new OSVs, will grow substantially in Europe, especially in the smaller countries of Europe (i.e., countries other than Germany, France, and the UK).

Asian open source projects and adoption will continue to expand. However, the difference maker will be OSVs. European OSV growth is slow in the last 2-3 years than the US, but will catch up as VC funding turns down.

In 2008 proprietary/closed source software will not be impacted by this growth. In most cases proprietary/closed source software will maintain market share. In cases or segments where market share is lost (DB, CRM, etc.), overall market will be maintained by other segments where established product in very large numbers or new products (Windows, Office, point solutions, etc.) lead to a net-zero change.

6. Outsourcers will Use More OSS and Publish Code Contents. While many outsourcers have used open source aggressively since the year 2000, mainstream outsourcers, mainly in India, have been in a state of denial about their use of open source. As outsourcers in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and China pose significant competition to Indian outsourcers, the fierce, new competitors are using open source to gain competitive advantage.

In 2008, outsourcers worldwide will increasingly publish the contents of their code to their clients. They have enjoyed a honeymoon in recent years because enterprises have focused on project delivery as opposed to the contents of the deliverable. Enforcement actions and lawsuits by the SFLC will lead technology companies and enterprises to pressure outsourcers to provide complete reports of code contents with great specificity.

7. The final decline of LinuxWorld. In the early years (2002-3) LinuxWorld was an important incubator of LAMP stack projects and OSV formation. In those times, foundations were a major vehicle for involvement in the FOSS community, and the attendees were mostly hobbyists and small developers. The 2007 LinuxWorld was dominated by hardware vendors and maturing and established OSVs.

In the US in 2008, OSBC and vertical software shows will emerge as the new center of gravity for visionary business people and developers and LinuxWorld will further decline in significance. LinuxWorlds outside the US will continue to prosper as these markets gear-up in OSS adoption.

--- ooo ---

One of the fun parts of writing a blog is that you can actively and accurately refer back to your predictions, in a self-criticism mode, and monitor how you are doing. I will be interested to see how these trends play out. Another fun part of writing a blog is soliciting feedback.

Gentle Reader: What do you think of the trends outlined above?

Funambol takes the AGPLv3 plunge

Funambol might be known for what they call their “open source mobile email & PIM sync solution,” but now they're going to be celebrated as being the “first major open source software company” to adopt the AGPLv3 license. Designed to close the so-called ASP loophole, the AGPLv3 requires companies that modify open source software running over a network (as opposed to being delivered on a CD or DVD) to make the source code publicly available.

According to Benjamin Mako Hill of the Free Software Foundation,

The GNU GPL has been the most successful free software license because it makes a program's source available to its users. This enables massive collaboration between developers, since everyone gets the same benefits from this rule. The GNU AGPL will enable the same kind of cooperation around web services and other networked software.

Funambol says the AGPLv3 is consistent with the Honest Public License the company had been developing since late 2006, but it switched to the AGPLv3 to eliminate an unnecessary multiplication of free software licenses.

I think this is a bold decision. This decision reinforces Funambol’s position as a leader in the open source industry. As I wrote in this blog in May 2007: Man up Google! Only time will tell whether other open source companies in the SaaS space will follow suit.

A Parable

In late 2002 a band called “The Happy Guys Band” formed in the Boston area. The founder of this band wanted to solve interesting musical problems and build a great band based on integrity and hard work. He had a vision that the band would tour the world, bringing the music he loved to a variety of cultures and a mixture of people with various backgrounds, professional and otherwise. Having a single founder with a vision, real management experience, and values made it easier for this band to thrive.

Today, like back then, the founder of this band was a determined guy. He wanted to make things better for his band mates and the followers of his form of music. He was also patient. He knew that the music he loved was new and innovative, and that not everyone would understand or like it. But he persevered.

Over time, the Happy Guys became more and more successful. This made the founder of the Happy Guys especially happy because he loved the music industry and wanted all his friends who loved music to thrive and enjoy music of all kinds. His band’s success was based on a philosophy of hiring musicians who have a track record of turning out great, great music. Today the band is respected throughout the world because of its music. Each musician in the band could lead their own band, and they all love the journey they are on.

One day, a rival band accused the Happy Guys of stealing musical notes. Of course, musical notes can’t be owned by anyone. But the rival band knew how to make a fuss. And they were sure no one would notice that they had copied those notes themselves. Some people did believe the rival band. How can you blame them? Stealing is bad and that’s what they responded to. But they were not thinking about how music is really made and shared among all musicians.

That made the Happy Guys sad.

Luckily the music industry has a deep and unshakable sense of what is right and wrong. They know that you can’t own musical notes – and that the more people use and share music, the better for everyone. The Happy Guys were happy again and remained so ever after.

The end.

Black Duck’s “Free and Open Source License Resource Center” -- It's live!

Today we introduce the first accurate sizing of free and open source licenses in the development environment today.

Black Duck’s “Free and Open Source License Resource Center” went live today. This resource center is an online guide of particular interest to companies developing or deploying software that includes code governed by version three of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Kudos to the Black Duck marketing and engineering teams who that helped create this page; kudos to the spider and QA team who help maintain it.

GPLv3 update

The latest data indicates steady growth in deployed GPLv3 licenses and a significant jump in deployed LGPLv3 licenses – but don’t focus too much on this latter data point.

As of September 7, GPLv3 reached the 450 project level, which is a growth of 48 percent since August 6.

Not to be outdone, LGPLv3 hit the 56 project level, a significant 87 percent growth from August 24. This may not be a sustainable trend, so we will monitor it in forthcoming blog entries.

Lastly, our crackerjack “Spider Team” at Black Duck reports that the total number of deployed GPLv3 and LGPLv3 projects reached 506 – an 18 percent increase over the August 24 level.

Overall, we're seeing steady growth in GPLv3 and LGPLv3 that we will continue to monitor.

Pinocchio doesn't live here

While adoption of GPLv3 is coming along slowly but surely, it's important not to inflate current adoption rates. In a recent blog post, Noah Clements from the Association for Competitive Technology took a vendor to task for doing just that:

Basically, what they did was to count all the projects licensed under version 2 “or later” as having converted to GPLv3. Furthermore they used unexplained estimates of “conversion rates” and “impact” to arrive at the “or later” figure in the first place. No matter how you slice it, that is dishonest.

Black Duck Software applies exacting standards to the harvesting, categorization, and analysis of licenses. Our enterprise customers and the open source community respect Black Duck Software because of the honesty and integrity that goes into everything we do.

v3 Growth

GPLv3 was a major change in many respects. I discussed this back in March in my post on the third draft of GPLv3, and Black Duck’s website has information about this as well.

On August 6, I reported in a blog entry that 305 projects have adopted GPLv3 since it was announced on June 29. As of August 17, that number had swelled to 335. That’s a 10 percent increase in two weeks! Meanwhile, 24 projects have adopted LGPLv3. That makes a grand total of 359 projects adopting either license.

Between these v3 licenses, GPL is chosen 9-out-of-10 times. This is the same ratio we had with v2 licenses. We have not seen a significant exodus to other licenses, nor have we seen a significant uptick in adoption of LGPLv3, which operates the same way as LGPLv2: reciprocity/copyleft is limited to the original work itself (i.e., it doesn't extend to code that is linked to).

It seems that with v3 licensing, the more things change, the more things remain the same.

Living on a prayer

During July we’ve seen some interesting developments:

• SugarCRM announced that their next major Sugar Community Edition release will adopt GPLv3.

• The Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), submitted by SocialText, was just approved by OSI as an Open Source license. Nice going, Ross! (Ross Mayfield is the CEO of SocialText.)

In the CPAL’s case, according to Groklaw, “the attribution language was taken from the Adaptive Public License, which was already an OSI-approved license, and as you will see, the new license is practically identical, so there is no big change at OSI, and no, this is not the first attribution license to be OSI-approved. Even GPLv3 allows you to require attribution, after all.”

The Groklaw article goes on to show how the SugarCRM and CPAL license term differ. Of course, Sugar may adopt CPAL for commercial products.

This brings up a sticky subject for me: OSI's website. OSI, can you keep your site and license pages updated? If the licenses are in process and there is a public acknowledgment or process of pending OSI approval, maintain the status of them. In the case of GPL and LGPL, both licenses are not up-to-date. If there is a process-related issue, state it on the website. If it’s not up on the website, one must assume the license is not approved, but that would conflict with what we know or read in the press.

And while we're on the subject of licensing: If the Free Software Foundation can solve big intergalactic problems like the patent licensing, DRM, and others, why can’t the OSI tackle attribution? Clearly this is an issue you can address, and having a standard that the community could look to would be useful.

I put it to you, loyal readers: Are these things really too much to ask? Non-trivial change in the open source world happens all the time. All it needs is a little push, or a prayer, from time to time.

SugarCRM makes a sweet choice

Today’s announcement by SugarCRM that their next major Sugar Community Edition release will adopt GPLv3 has generated lots of ink.

John Roberts, Sugar’s CEO, said the following as part of this announcement:

We are proud to adopt the GPLv3with our next major Sugar Community Edition release. We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for leading such an important effort to deliver the most modern FOSS license. The FSF undertook a very difficult process and incorporated many diverse developer and user needs and combined them into a fair and just representation of what FOSS means to our communities.

In a previous blog entry, I wrote I felt that the OSI did not do enough to communicate around the OSD with respect to other companies. John did the right thing by at first asserting and holding fast to his company’s position relative to the Gartner Group, OSI, and the open source community. But after considerable community commentary, his company has adopted a very rational and effective solution.

Bravo, John.

Samba already went GPLv3 in in early July, and GPLv3 will no doubt get a further boost from today's announcement by Sugar. GPLv3 seems destined to become the eventual standard for open source licensing and takes some momentum away from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) -- a northern California favorite -- that was gaining favor after the release of GPLv3 draft 2 because of the the patent, DRM, and other conditions in that draft. Now, because GPLv3 has sweetened the deal (so to speak), SugarCRM will be able to offer customers its Professional edition with a commercial license.

Chalk up another success for dual licensing and GPLv3.

GPL3: Time Will Tell

GPL3 and LGPL3 was released today.

The effort made around GPL3 has been unprecedented and extraordinary. In this distributed license creation, education and commentary effort, the FSF brought together so many technology companies, lawyers, developers, government representatives and others to contribute their time and expertise. These participants and the FSF had very different visions of GPL3 and how free and open source software (FOSS) should work and coexist. Bringing them all together to sort through the issues makes GPL3 a historic and remarkable achievement.

From the beginning, Black Duck has been involved in the process as a participant on Committee C, having both the company’s General Counsel, Kat McCabe, and a key advisor, Karen Copenhaver, attended meetings. Committee C was populated with attorneys and other representatives of large users from the U.S. and all over the world. The analysis of drafts provided by the Committee was rapid and rigorous. I found it energizing to read email reactions to the drafts and issues.

Eben Moglen did a supreme job driving the overall process, license, and the intellectual underpinnings of the new version as well as commentary of proposed changes. At some points over the last 18 months he looked totally worn out, carrying the weight of the process, his clients and community on his shoulders. He deserves a lot of credit for the realization of this achievement.

Through the long and very detail oriented process, attorneys for the FSF and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) – especially Richard Fontana – did a tremendous job. They were clear, reasoned and helpful. And their openness, patience and diligence were remarkable. Taking in comments from all sides and trying to address as many concerns as possible was certainly challenging. The FSF showed a lot of willingness to respond to concerns and moved considerably on a number of issues, including patent retaliation and DRM. Whether that effort produced a license that companies will use or adopt – that will take some time to determine. Whether that effort produced a license that companies will use or adopt – that will take some time to determine.

Did the FSF fulfill their mission?

V3 Imminent

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will officially release the GNU GPL Version 3 this Friday at noon (EDT).

This is a great achievement.

Speaking on behalf of my colleagues at Black Duck who supported the process and contributed to Subcommittee C, it was a very interesting to be part of this little piece of software history. It was an honor as well.

Three Cheers for Michael Tiemann

Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat and the President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), has issued a statement through the OSI that speaks to companies which fallaciously uses the "open source software" label. He suggests that companies using the OSS label adhere to the OSD. (See blog entries Part One and Part Two on this subject below).

He seems to direct much of his message toward John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. While this makes some sense, Sugar is by no means the only company in this faction. I think he has to broaden his message and not just attack John.

I hope this represents the first step, in a multistep process, of the OSI emerging to enforce the OSD, addressing license proliferation and providing some leadership in the OSS industry.

GPLv3 Release Date

The release of the GPLv3 license is expected to be June 29 according to the FSF.

What is an open source company? Part Two.

The controversy over what is an open source company won’t go away. The Gartner Group is preparing a full research report that claims SugarCRM, Zimbra, Mule Source, and several other companies are not living up to the Open Source Definition (OSD) and therefore are not true open source companies.

Some of the contentions in this report have already been previewed in the press, and some of the findings have been published before by Gartner's Mark Driver. Further, the forthcoming report will indicate that these companies are using the phrase “open source software” for marketing purposes and are not truly open source companies.

The allegations made by Gartner against SugarCRM are simple: SugarCRM does not have an OSI approved license and does not correspond to the OSD.

For his part, Roberts asserts that OSI licensure would harm SugarCRM's business. He adds that the OSI itself is dysfunctional and should not be the arbiter of what is open source. Still, in a recent interview, he explicitly denied that SugarCRM violates the letter of the OSD:

SugarCRM has always believed that Sugar Open Source is compliant with the OSD [Open Source Definition]. Specifically, Sugar Open Source includes the full source code, is modifiable, is redistributable and is patent-free.

This makes me think that Roberts has failed to understand the rationale behind the OSD.

Let me say here that I happen to agree with Roberts that the OSI is dysfunctional and has done a terrible job of managing this controversy. Like him, I am very disappointed to see what has happened with an organization that was founded to expand the use, and maintain the quality and growth of, free and open source software (FOSS). But that is no reason for SugarCRM to ignore or depreciate the role OSI plays — in particular the OSI’s function to pass licenses through the sieve of the OSD to determine if they comply.

Apparently, the SugarCRM license does not comply with the OSD. It is not sufficient to say that software is "full source code, modifiable, redistributable and patent-free," particularly when the company doesn't really mean "modifiable" in the way the OSD requires it, or "reciprocal" as the open source community understands to be. (For example, developers cannot modify the welcome or splash screen to take off unnecessary and unwanted messages.) There are OSI-approved licenses that can solve Sugar’s problem, and language can be added to address the company’s attribution problem. It seems that Roberts has rejected this compromise. He wants his license approved, so the controversy persists.

I think it is appropriate for important business reasons to discriminate against certain types of commercial uses of software, but this is where Gartner has it all wrong. There is nothing wrong with commerce for commerce's sake. The GNU/GPL, OSI, and the open source community recognize and explicitly do not prohibit it. But SugarCRM’s attribution controversy should not be solved by changing the OSD — Sugar should accommodate the OSD and submit their license for OSI approval.

SugarCRM and the other software vendors “on the bubble” should work with the OSI directly, or through their attorneys, both to fine-tune their own licenses and evolve the OSI. The Gartner report controversy just reinforces my belief that the OSI needs to adopt the new realities of commercial ventures in the open source community.

Finally, I think that a new terminology is needed, one that acknowledges a vendors’ use of a community software development methodology, but not necessarily "open source" (as defined by the OSI) software development. Maybe Gartner can help here — after all, this is their job.

My response to allegations about SugarCRM and similar companies is a simple analogy about membership in Red Sox Nation. Some Red Sox fans do not consider me a true fan and member of the Nation. After all, I do not attend many games, watch very few games on TV, only occasionally read articles about the Sox and don’t really follow the stats — all of these are unpardonable sins to some of the Fenway faithful. They consider me a closet Yankees fan because I respect the Bronx Bombers as a business. Nevertheless, I am a Red Sox fan and a proud member of the Red Sox Nation, which is a tough community to operate in or be seen as a member of.

In a similar way, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Mule Source, and several other companies should be embraced as open source companies and members of the open source community. They, like me, think that the open source community is a big tent, taking in all kinds of companies and software developers.

We all must remember that times change, and human organizations — both SugarCRM and OSI — have to adjust with the times.

GPL 3.0 Status

We have been informed that the “last call” draft of GPL 3.0 will be released this coming Friday, June 1st. Based on information from the prior draft there is a 30-day comment period to follow. The FSF is planning to release the final version of GPL3 on July 1st.

Google's decision to “man up”

When we tell someone to “man up,” we aren't being sexist. Instead we're telling them to take responsibility for their own actions, not to pass the buck to someone else.

It's rare for companies these days to openly man up. Google, on the other hand, is doing things old school.

It seems that even the Web 2.0 companies with the greatest vision and customer responsiveness can screw up. In Google's case, the screw-up involved intellectual property—the company admitted this past Monday that they helped themselves to code created by Chinese IT firm Sohu.com. For those keeping score at home, the stolen code is embedded in Google's Pinyin Input Method Editor.

Sohu sent a warning to Google last Friday asking them to stop distributing the pirated software. Once they got caught, the "do no evil" gang in Mountain View did the right thing: they emailed an apology to Sohu this past Monday morning, making sure to copy Reuters. "We are willing to face this issue of ours," Google bravely wrote. "While we apologize for the inconvenience this may have incurred to users and Sohu, we have also adopted immediate actions."

Google's apology is commendable, but this isn't the first time they've been caught “borrowing” code. For example, early releases of Google video player included unacknowledged source code from the VLC player. And a former engineer from social networking company Affinity Engines (now Affinity Circles) took that company's code to Google, where it was completely replicated—bugs and all—and turned into Orkut, Google's own social networking site.

Google did the right thing. Man up and all that. Good leadership from an industry leader.