OSCON Open Source license obsolete?

26Jul/063

OSCON Open Source license obsolete?

During Tim O’Reillys keynote this morning, he put forth a controversial notion that the current OSS licenses were obsolete. What he meant was that they only covered distribution and that the current crop of web apps aren’t really relevant to the OSS licenses or at least aren’t covered by them. Why is this? He makes the point that the GNU General Public License'>GPL and such cover software you install on your machine. You don’t install most web apps on your machine. No one is running a local copy of Flickr, but access to your data is open via the Flickr API.

Now I see that Phil Haacked and others are having a conversation about a popular ASP.NET based CMS called Community Server. Does it qualify as Open Source? You can download the source, but you can’t distribute the code. You might be able to submit changes to the code and have them accepted. But if you can’t distribute your changes, does it qualify? Does it matter?

‘Tis the season to talk about OS licenses I guess.

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http://haacked.com/ Haacked

Interesting. But I fail to see how the current crop of web apps obsolete open source licenses. It’s an easy question. Is the source code freely available under an open source license? If not, then it’s not an Open Source application.

I think what Tim should be pointing out is that there is a new arena for openness that needs new licensing terms. To me, Flickr is an “Open Data” application. I can put data in and freely get my data out.

It’s perpendicular to the issue of whether or not it is Open Source.
Scott

Well, he wasn’t saying that the current web apps make the GNU General Public License'>GPL and such obsolete. He was pointing out that the users don’t need to install the web applications on their machine, they can just run them over the web. As a consequence, fewer and fewer web apps are being Open Sourced. There needs to be a GNU General Public License'>GPL type license that covers these types of applications. Perhaps some kind of “Open API license” that would allow you to create derivatives based on the available API as long as you maintain the same API. I don’t know.

Another key point he made is in some cases, the value of the web app comes from the number of users using it. If Flickr were open source and you could download the code and install it on your system, what would differentiate it from iPhoto or Picassa? Mainly the limited UI. What makes Flickr useful is the social aspect, which means lots of users, which means lots of infrastructure, which means lots of cost. More on the idea of “Open infrastructure” here. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/07/the_rise_of_open_infrastructur.html
Scott

Here’s a little better (and shorter) explanation of what Tim was saying.
“Maybe a little overstated in its statement, what Tim is saying is that Open Source licenses become irrelevant if the code is changed and run on web server somewhere, and it never redistributed. The community needs to create a similar definition for Open Services.”
http://bhansley.blogspot.com/2006/07/oscon-06-day-3-morning_26.html

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