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
It's great to see Red Hat joining in to challenge the basis for a patent troll (and amazing to see it done to support Microsoft), but I am concerned to see you framing this as an assault on "bad patents", as if improving patent quality will help developers somehow. The locus of the problem is not "bad patents" but rather the bad system of law surrounding the legacy understanding of patents.
The fact is that anyone can gain a patent on an idea that any software developer anywhere might spontaneously devise, and then use that patent as the anchor for what is effectively legally-sanctioned blackmail. Improving the technical quality of those anchors for extortion does little to give FOSS developers safety from attack.
So while it's a great thing to challenge the trolls, please can Red Hat use a different "frame" to talk about it? One that doesn't imply there are "good" software patents?
Thanks, Jason. I'll watch out for those things to happen. I'm pretty sure I logged in before today, though, so there may be some bugs still lurking in the system that need running to ground.