Category: 4.2 Open Source (Society)
-
The societal value of commercial open source
The heat about recent relicensing in open source land has dissipated a bit. To recap in a nutshell what had people riled up: Venture-capital-backed startups increasingly went to market by providing their software product, in particular software infrastructure components, under an open source license (dual-licensing, next to their commercial license). Eventually, payday came, and they…
-
Interview on open source and security with DLF Kultur (in German)
I had a ten minute interview with the enjoyably competent Marcus Richter and Hagen Terschüren of DLF Kultur last week. It aired as part of the Breitband show on Saturday April 6th. Our topic was open source infrastructure, security challenges to it, and whether the state needs to step up. It is available as XZ-Backdoor:…
-
Open Source Explained lecture in TUM lecture series on digital sustainability
Today I had the pleasure of giving a talk about open source in the TUM lecture series on digital sustainability, organized by Alexander Pretschner of TU Munich, bidt, and TU Wien. The talk was in German and streamed, but not recorded. Below please find my slides.
-
Open source and the hyphen
You may have seen the repeated fights over whether open-source software should be spelled with a hyphen or not. It just flared up on Wikipedia, again. The rules are clear, in my opinion. Still, the situation is a misery. First things first: If “open source” is used as an adjective (attribute) in front of a…
-
Open source is not the infrastructure of modern society…
Cloud services are the actual infrastructure. Open source is the blueprints and building materials of our digital infrastructure. Infrastructure should be built from open source, but it is important to understand the difference between software and a service, because there is a person in the middle, the one operating the service. There will be no…
-
Whose open source freedom is it anyway?
It is 2021 and there is still a lot of fighting about “freedom” in open source software development. Here is an analytical breakdown of the issues. Freedom can refer to people or artifacts (source code). When it refers to people, it is typically freedom of choice regarding what to do. There are three main roles…