- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us - Winston Churchill
Intel, Google warn of Open Source risks
IN MOST OPEN sauce fairy tales, little Linux developers tremble in fear at the mention of the big, bad Vole, but with Google and Intel now seemingly joining Microsoft in its huffing and puffing, the story of open sourcery could do with a refresh.
Apparently Google's Open Source chief, Chris DiBona, and Intel's head Linux and Open Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, have gone on record, at a briefing in San Francisco, saying the use of open source software can be not just risky but also very expensive if not done properly.
Whilst this sort of fear mongering is expected from a company like Mighty-Soft, it is a little unexpected coming from two giants known for their enthusiasm and support of Open Source.
But, insist the two open source proponents, the risks are real and firms will have to start being more and more careful to comply with the plethora of open source licenses attached to the non proprietary code they often use.
"Open source is a huge asset for businesses," says Chipzilla's Hohndel, but warns "of course if you get it wrong it could cost thousands of dollars in damages if you get sued."
The pair noted projects risked losing all licensing rights from careless ‘contamination' and ‘infection' of the firm's proprietary software with open source code.
"The worst in these is how many people are completely ignorant on how licenses and rules work," continued Hohndel, adding companies should extensively train employees involved in software development in open source software licensing.
"I have to tell Googlers, that they can learn from books but most of the time you can never copy from it. And this is crazy but that's how it is," adds DiBona.
Chipping in again, Hohndel points out some countries don't even allow for the concept of public domain, Germany being a case in point. You can not relinquish your copyright. So even if you think you are releasing something in the public domain, you can't. Which means the people who use this public domain code are wrong," explains Hohndel.
So apparently Intel and Gurgle are still all for free love and open sauciness, but both are now cautiously advocating safe sauce. In other words, ‘if you're going to do it, please use protection kids'. µ
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GPL bad, zlib and BSD licenses good?
(1) Developers should be weary of "intellectual property" issues.
(2) Businesses should assess, plan, and test BEFORE diving into open source.
...And the rest is the usual "attention seeking" headline of a typical news site.
Nothing new here.
They had to have a briefing to tell developers that they should read licenses?
Just use common sense- have a policy, make sure people know the policy, and better still, use an automated tool (so many these days eg Protecode) to take the pain away from developers.
Thought I'd point out a couple of things...
The point of the talk was to help the largely business audience understand what open source governance looks like in companies with a huge number of developers. The point of the talk is explaining the corner cases of the licenses that we've had to uniquely deal with was the point of the talk.
We've both released tens of millions of lines of code under a variety of licenses including the GPL. So we're clearly comfortable with open source intake and release.
We have nothing to sell to this audience and chose to speak only to show how we approach the challenge of open source compliance. We both have a vested interest in Linux and open source succeeding, so know that we were not trying to scare people away from it.
C..p, how I am suppose to use equations without coping them from books?
This is getting crazy
This action by these two may be intended as some sort of counter to Microsoft's "mixed-source" push.
It's not fair
And I think you're really mean
I think you're really mean
I think you're really mean
Oh you're supposed to care
But you never ...
Oh it's not fair
And it's really not ok
It's really not ok
It's really not ok
Oh you're supposed to care
But all you do is take
Yeah all you do is take
And then you make this noise and its apparent it's all over
For student: Sadly, a lot of books are to be learned, but not copied, from. An example: you can copy code from "numerical recipes in c" and use it only if you buy a copy for every engineer in your company. If you have 10 engineers, that's not a bad thing, if you have 10k...
So I'll tell you what I tell folks at google: "Books are to be learned from, not copied." at least not all of them, some publishers are better than others.
It seams to me, the warning is not about using open source, but about the risk of being caught if one STEALS open source code. There is a difference I reckon.
OK, so it looks like everyone is getting something different out of this article.
I guess when I read it, I think of a company that writes their own software, who then includes open source software in their proprietary code to obtain desired functionality.
Well... You can't use open source for profit, so if you expect to profit from "your" software, it better not include open source components.
-
Buy something that doesn't suck.
What happens if I just want to say fsck it, and actively destroy any evidence I can that proves that it belongs to me? What happens then?
Andy wrote: "Well... You can't use open source for profit,"
You can do anything you want with open source AS LONG AS you abide by the license terms.
Some companies might be at risk using open source tools. Maybe.
But now every open source tool isn't dangerous to use. If you look at companies such as Pentaho data integration or Talend (software I tend to use, no $ in them :D ), they both have large companies as client and are both open source. One of them even has the French police as customer with thousands of computers, having Talend open studio software installed on them. How could that be risky?
Some companies might be a little uncertain, others aren't. All you need is to be careful when choosing your open source company.
The MS/TomTom FAT32 patent squabble illustrates that the MOST SIGNIFICANT danger comes from incorporating proprietary code that has *transitioned* into the public domain (such as by becoming a defacto standard, such as FAT32 on USB drives, MP3 players, etc.), OR by being surreptitiously "donated" by some beneVOLEant organization (ahem...Microsoft...Mono...Moonlight...OOXML).
Just compare:
- the number of lawsuits (and resulting damages) revolving around proprietary code or patents, to
- the number of lawsuits (and resulting damages) revolving around open-source code and GPL.
Certainly, everyone should be prudent in using code lawfully, but the biggest and most insidious (and most willfully-propagated) danger is coming from the likes of Microsoft (the big-ticket threat to virtually all other businesses on the planet).