ZDNet article - why attribution matters

[David RR Webber]

Ben,

Paraphrasing your comment - the real assessment developers need is "will my
managers buy-off on me using this?".  Frankly that is what keeps RedHat in
business - being the safety net insurance that the CFO can write checks to
each month and deflect executive board questions away with.

Therefore what I'm envisioning is a formula that CFOs and CTOs can use to
quickly evaluate open source tools with - because once their legal council
has OKd the license - that's the next place they head - business
factors/justification, and mostly avoidance of bad karma.

A ready recipe here could establish a good practice code for the community -
and lessen the need for artificial devices in the licenses such as 'thou
shalt insert this orange balloon on all appendages that are green with
purple stripes, etc'.

And that is really what we're all about supposedly - fostering the right
environment for better software.  I spend a good deal of my time fighting
such management behaviours as my job as a consultant - and convincing them
that they too have roles and responsibilities - and that you reap as much as
you sow - applies.  Any tools and templates to make this crossing of the
bridge safer and tried and tested for these people - will significantly help
adoption and support, as opposed to rejection and distrust.

DW

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Tilly [mailto:btilly at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 7:22 PM
To: Michael Tiemann
Cc: David RR Webber (XML); Chuck Swiger; Lawrence E. Rosen; David Berlind;
John-Sugar; license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: ZDNet article - why attribution matters

On 11/28/06, Michael Tiemann <tiemann at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 12:06 -0700, David RR Webber (XML) wrote:
>
> > Once again though we come back to who manages and maintains that and 
> > where?  Perhaps some kind of eBay rating system is in order - where 
> > people can post for and against and developers can post a link to 
> > their own entry in the rating bank - and you get points for 
> > contributions and such to the source base?
>
> Such a ratings system is entirely orthogonal to the one most 
> interesting to developers which has precisely four values:
>
> 0.  Not open source
> 1.  Not submitted for review -- unknown 2.  Submitted for review -- 
> unknown, but positions being taken 3.  OSI approved

You forgot "compatible with the project I'm working on" which has a much
more complex valuation.  For a large part of the community, however, that
boils down to, "GPL compatible."

Cheers,
Ben