Michael Tiemann's blog

I am proud to be a member of the open source community. I am especially proud when I can use open source to do something really unexpected, like getting my daughter all excited about doing something just a little bit batty, making a promise of success, and then, delivering on that promise, in spades.

I started to respond to David Richards (the CEO of CentricCRM) comment to the thread I started last week, but that thread has generated a number of sub-threads which I think are better addressed separately. (You can be the judge as to whether this thread separation is a good idea or not.) Thus, I gave a partial response there, and here's really my full response.

David,

First, let me thank you for stepping forward into this discussion.

Dana Blankenhorn's story How far can open source CRM get? has finally pushed me to respond to the many people who have asked "When is the OSI going to stand up to companies who are flagrantly abusing the term 'open source'?" The answer is: starting today.

Stanford Professor David Kelley is one of those rare individuals who has successfully added a new way of thinking to Western Thought: Design Thinking. Indeed, the National Academy of Engineering recognized him for nothing less than "affecting the practice of design." I have come to have great respect for the process of design thinking that David Kelley formalized and now teaches, and now it is time to show that respect by actually practicing what is preached.

It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0. As I wrote in Open Sources, it was the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point). Having first read and lightly hacked Emacs code in 1985, having read and lightly hacked GDB code in 1986, I eagerly attended a week-long lecture series on Emacs Stallman gave in Febrary 1987 at MCC in Austin Texas.

Yesterday I was blog-tagged by Stephen Walli. Does the fact that he tagged for other people mean that I'm not "it"? Oh well...the topic is one that interests me, and I think he started the ball rolling in an interesting direction, so I figure I'll add my thoughts.

For my money, the three ways that open source can benefit one's business (presuming you are in the business of open source) is:

In 2003, Nicholas Carr shook up an increasingly irrelevant community of CIOs by publishing the article "IT Doesn't Matter". I believe that he got it half right: the irreversable trend of information technology was toward commodity economics, and thus the idea of paying rents for proprietary software was preposterous. What he did not quite get right was to properly recognize that his insight was itself a strategic enabler for those intelligent enough to understand the competitive consquences of the trend he identified.

A few months ago I posted my initial impressions for a draft version of the GPLv3 license, and I am happy to say that as with other licenses developed with community input, the then-good GPLv3 has continued to improve. As I read the "final" draft version of GPLv3, which I think is truly excellent, I thought about the discussions from last year about some other licenses submitted to the license-discuss@opensource.org mailing list.

Alan MacCormack published a new paper entitled A Developer Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center. Whenever I see a statement of developer desiderata, I'm reminded of this timeless posting by One Laptop Per Child hacker extraordinaire Chris Blizzard:

The news outlets, radio waves, and blogosphere [1] and [2] continue to buzz with responses to the FORTUNE magazine article where Microsoft claims that many popular Open Source software packages, including the Linux kernel, infringe some 235