Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
I concur with your concerns. From the beginning, this hasn't really been run in the way successful open source projects are. I don't know the details on the problems they are having with real or potential security, infrastructure, or scalability ... but these are exactly the sort of issues that respond well to the open collaboration methodology.
That said, I don't think it's ever really too late, as long as the developers really work to understand where to make changes in their development methods. Until then, they are making the same risk we so many others get in to -- all the disadvantages of a closed source development model without the supposed benefits of restricted code.
While I do recommend they could use <a href="http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki">The Open Source Way</a> handbook, I really recommend they read <em>the</em> canonical book, <a href="http://www.producingoss.com/">Producing Open Source Software</a>. If they have read it, I recommend they go back over it and see where they are conveniently ignoring principles and practices ... and stop doing that.
Many people who help companies such as Red Hat build defensive patent portfolios have an uneasy feeling at the same time. "What if we get acquired by a company hostile to our ideals and plans about a defensive-only portfolio?"
That appears to be exactly what is happening right now with the situation of Sun patents acquired by Oracle. This article summarizes James Gosling's blog post:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/why-software-patents-are-a-joke-literally/2039
In the original post (http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/quite_the_firestorm ) Gosling reveals that Sun engineers had a contest amongst themselves to make patents out of clearly unpatent worthy processes in order to see who could get the most ridiculous patent through. Gosling points, as an example, to one of his patents that describes an un-novel power switch.
So the engineers were making defensive-only patents in an environment that actually eschewed them, and they unwittingly set up the current situation with Oracle owning a large patent portfolio filled with potentially unwarranted simple-machine software patents and a willingness to use them as business leverage or for straight lawsuits (i.e., offensive instead of defensive.)
If you were in the position of advising a group of open source engineers working at a company such as Red Hat who were concerned about this, what would you recommend they do and think?
Do you think there is any value other than the good story aspect to Gosling revealing that some of the patents currently under litigation might have been intended as jokes instead of representing serious innovation?