Richard Fontana

Ever since I began to be involved in FOSS legal matters I noticed that there is a degree of collaboration and cooperation among the lawyers who work in this area that I never really saw in the several other areas of legal practice in which I worked in the past. I have wondered whether in some sense these lawyers have more or less unconsciously been influenced by the broader social values of the developers whose work forms the basis of their legal work.

This is a good example of how "open" has become meaningless. Decades ago community software developers wrestled with the issue of whether it was legitimate and sound policy to use copyright to prohibit commercialization; they concluded that it was not. Linux, Apache, and Moodle, cited by Mr. Forte as examples of "open licensing", are in fact licensed quite differently from this company's textbooks, as their terms contain no commercial use restrictions.

The Linux kernel briefly was licensed by Linus Torvalds under <a href="http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01">an anti-commercial license</a>, but Torvalds <a href="http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12">soon switched to the GPL</a>. Had the kernel remained under that earlier license, it would have been about as world-changing as, say, minix (which itself <a href="http://minix1.woodhull.com/faq/mxlicense.html">eventually adopted a FOSS license</a>). The other day was the <a href="https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_software_foundation_announces2">15th
anniversary of the Apache web server project</a>. Does anyone think Apache would even have been remembered today had it chosen an anti-commercial license? (And needless to say there would have been no Red Hat, no opensource.com, and we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.)