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Open Source Think Tank: What CIOs really do…
Posted 9 February, 2008 by Chris in GPL, Open Source, REST Services, mashupcamp
At ThinkTank this week there was a CIO panel where they discussed things that Open Source solution providers could do to simplify procurement. A big hurdle to Open Source adoption continues to be license proliferation.
I had thought that this hubbub had died down with the release of GPLv3 and the adoption of the CPAL license, but apparently it has not. All CIOs on the panel agreed that if we could all just agree on a license it would make their lives much easier.
Turns out that some people just didn’t buy it. Larry Rosen chimed in: Why isn’t the proliferation of commercial licenses an obstacle for procurement? Don’t you have to deal with hundreds of different commercial licenses?
To which the reply was: Well, to be honest, we don’t read the commercial licenses.
4 Responses to “Open Source Think Tank: What CIOs really do…”
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Roberto Galoppini Says:
February 10th, 2008 at 8:16 am
I think Larry was right, but I also understand CIOs’ point of view. Medium to large enterprise basically adopt open source software by themselves, reducing if not avoiding the burden of the procurement process. If my assumption is right, I understand why many CIOs were stressing the license issue: they need to step by the legal department to check out if they can or not use that software. If the license issue was gone, they could freely pick up open source programs from the net, and put them in production in hours.
MarkMadsen Says:
February 11th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I think they were joking a little on that response, but the point is valid in one respect. We all know the standard clauses in commercial contracts, even though there is one for every commercial product on the market. We’ve learned what to look for and the legal department understands the language and the common issues.
With open source licenses, there are some key differences between each. There are also some key differences between open source and commercial licenses in the clauses they share and which are unique. The consumer side needs to learn these things. Today they’re still a challenge.
Reducing to a couple open licenses with common language and clauses an OSS vendor can include or exclude, like the way Creative Commons licenses work, would be beneficial.
John Koenig Says:
February 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I wasn’t there but my guess is that this was just a flip remark by a panelist. Of course these businesses must read their commercial licenses. The lesson here however, is that the commercial licenses have been benchmarked and negotiated ad nauseum by their collective legal counsels. By comparison, the open source licenses are not primarily designed to be commercially acceptable or necessarily commercially viable at all. The CIOs should be concerned about them, but so should the developers. Both could do a much better job communicating their needs and objectives.
Open Source Think Tank 2008: some feedback | Commercial Open Source Software Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 5:10 am
[...] Many CIOs during their panel sessions screamed against license proliferation, a term referring to the so called “explosion of choice” in open source licensing. Why that? I think that Larry Rosen was right telling them that it is plenty of proprietary licenses, and I tried to figure out why all this concern for open source licensing. Talking with Colin Bodell, Amazon VP Website Applications Platform, I confirmed the idea that the big guys cook their own meal. Basically they don’t need to spend time and effort with any procurement process to acquire (by downloading) open source software, but they have to ask the legal department. I see the problem, though I understand that SMEs are not affected by this, while they experience a much bigger problem with open source software selection. [...]