Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Great topics to think about and a good start of covering the key issues between terminology. A key bit missing is: what are the commonly accepted definitions of the terms?
While defining words can turn into philosophical conundra, there are two organizations that are widely seen as the de facto definers of the terms, which are useful to point to. I'd argue that the proper definitions come from:
- "Free software" is defined by the FSF and their four essential freedoms: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html which lay out the principles for what the term "free software" means. They also have a list of licenses that qualify as free software: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
- "Open source" software is defined by the OSI and their ten points of the open source definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated They also include a list of licenses that qualify as "open source" here: https://opensource.org/licenses
We can each debate about our personal meanings of free vs. open, or what specific communities tend to use. But the larger ecosystem - and the world - use the FSF and OSI's definitions, so any discussion should start from there.
Another key factor is the type of organization, in particular, the relationship of participating individuals to the organization. What works for a corporation with employees is often very different than what works for a loosely associated FOSS project - or a local neighborhood group or government feedback program.
The "stake" and relationship the individuals who might be speaking up is a huge part of this. Employees and citizen voters in local government have clear stakes in issues that may materially affect their day-to-day lives. Open source contributors - with no other tie than the use of fungible software bits - have far less tie, and often (seem to) have more erratic and often poor results when anonymity is allowed, opening the door to drive-by complaints from anonymous users who don't really care about the project as a whole.