Computer industry and open source veteran Simon Phipps started Public Software, a European host for open source projects, and volunteers as President at OSI and a director at The Document Foundation. His posts are sponsored by Patreon patrons - become one if you'd like to see more!
Over a 30+ year career he has been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies. He has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with networking standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM.
In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, coordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform and the rest of Sun’s broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses.
He takes an active interest in several Free and Open Source software organisations and also serves as a director of the UK's Open Rights Group, campaigning for digital rights. He was previously instrumental in the revival of the Open Source Initiative, serving as a director and as its President, a role to which he has now returned. A widely read thought-leader, he publishes regularly both on his own blog and in many other places such as IDG’s InfoWorld.
Authored Comments
Thanks, Michael. I find it deeply frustrating how my political representatives continue to treat internet access as a frippery rather than as an emerging human right. I've actually sat in an MEP's office and heard him talk about how "preventing downloads" is much more important than "guaranteeing access". I am at something of a loss to know how to make the point any more strongly.
Missed your comment originally, sorry.
I don't think the risks you face are any different to the risks of using proprietary libraries; both have contract terms that need managing in shipped products. At Sun, we used a workflow system for all copyrighted materials entering the company so that we could track and fulfil our responsibilities in anything we shipped. Treating GPL software as in some way toxic is a natural first reaction to the unfamiliar, but allowing it to persist is simply a mistake; manage the risk, don't let the risk manage you.
That's even assuming there's a risk, of course. It's not clear if you work for a company selling software; if you do, there's definitely a risk to manage, but f the software products you create are for use by your own company or for deployment as a web service, the distribution trigger isn't pulled on the GPL and there's essentially no risk to manage.