 We're going to talk a little bit about open source licensing now and I'll have the panelists to introduce themselves. Stefano, do you want to start? Hi, I'm Stefano MacFulli and I've been involved in open source for most of my career starting as the lead at the Free Software Foundation Europe in Italy many years ago and then I took a break from open source advocacy full-time or for non-profit organizations working a lot in marketing and community management in various open source projects and products backed by corporations and now I'm the executive director at the open source initiative. And Tom? Hi, my name is Tom Calloway, people call me Spot. I have been in open source my entire adult life. I skipped the last day of my junior year of high school to go to Linux Expo and I have never looked back. Currently I'm an open source evangelist at AWS. Awesome, thanks. So we'll start off with sort of a gentle question that is just broadly speaking. What are the benefits of open source licenses? I can start and I can say that for me open source has always been about the simplicity of the adoption of software. When I started my career that's how I realized that software was being distributed with very cumbersome ways and you had to call a lawyer or a salesperson. I have to go through very complex cycles before you could even start using the software and then you had to ask even for more permissions before you could modify it if it was allowed at all. With open source basically things started to become a lot clearer and the open source definition defines a set of rights and obligations that you have to have as a user of the software and as a developer and contributor. That makes things a lot clearer. There is a playing field that is leveled and that everybody can understand very easily in lay terms. Open source definition really defines what open source is, the open source initiatives. Initiative reviews licenses, reviews the legal text and basically says this license carries the values that are in the open source definition and therefore you can trust the fact that you can use it and have those rights embedded in the software you're downloading. One way to look at it for me. That's a great explanation. I think that for me the value of the open source license is to mitigate the risk so that when you put an open source license on a work you make it clear to everyone from the lawyers to the CFO's office to all of your contributors you help them to understand what they can and can't do with your software and open source licenses by nature are very permissive. They grant you a large set of rights that allow you to do things that you can't do with proprietary software. Then from an end user and contributor perspective, generally what's the impact of software licenses? I think that the impact of software licenses to the end user is really that it empowers you to do whatever you want to do with that software. Whether it is simply to use it which is perfectly fine or to take it beyond that and say hey I would love it if the software had this capacity or this feature or more likely I would love it if the software stopped having this particular bug and I would like to get in there and try and fix it. I think that it creates the opportunity for digital curiosity for you to learn more about how your computer works and to be able to make it work for you not just the way that somebody else intended it to. Yeah that's definitely one of the powerful ways by which I got attracted to open source. I started by being not a developer as an architect and I was playing around with software that was complex and difficult to acquire at the joint research center at the European Commission as a researcher and I just had to dinker with the software all the time and with the proprietary software systems it was just too complicated and most of my machines for example did not have a C compiler. The fact that I could go on the internet and find the new compiler collection and download it and use it to solve my problem as a researcher it was great but then going forward in my career when I started to go more into the marketing for example then I still had a lot of value in open source and free software because I could rely on a wider race of corporations being able to provide support for example for different software that I was using and that's another thing that really open source enables is to have a lot of for the users to have a lot more freedom of choice between the providers of the software and and the solutions that they need provides for a wider race what other array of competition in the market and in in general it has brought a lot of innovation to lots of new product products that hit the market because software components were already available so developers at that stage did not have a lot of choice and to build on top of the giants shoulders of the giants so a problem that's come up recently although it's not at all new is sort of like what happens when projects that are open source are locked down or made proprietary so what are the impacts on users and on organizations who are relying on that open source software when it's changed to a proprietary license well that's a very complicated um complicated scenarios but in so we talked about how software and open source software enables freedom of choice and and empowers the users and when when as as a user I start using software that is licensed under certain conditions have a certain expectations when those expectations get removed because the original developer and the sole copyright owner of the project removes rights that I assume they have that is kind of of a betray of of trust and and it could be very it could be very dangerous and and damaging for for a lot of this different reason so I remember one of the stories for how the open stock project started and it started because one of the it was not a license change but it was basically a the only owner of the copyright of one of the projects that opens stock users wanted to use had before open stock existed this project would not accept patches because they did not want to have their software offer capabilities that the community wanted and the that ended up creating open stock as a reaction like we the community and the users needed those features and instead of having to ask permissions and constantly begging the the only copyright owner to accept patches they they went on and created their own their own software I would go even farther than that and say that you know when when a project goes from open source away from an open source license they effectively destroy their community and I think that the community is one of the huge things that makes open source so special and so wonderful is having an open source community is a statement that says that we we are open to all ideas big small great and minor and we want your help to build something wonderful together and when you take a step away from your community you're telling them that you don't value their input anymore that you don't value the opportunity from them to directly contribute that you are the only one that knows what's right for this software and you will be the one that is right forever more and I think that's that's kind of arrogant and short-sighted and it's very disappointing to see projects going in that direction I really think that this is something that the irony is that when these things happen there's almost always a counter reaction of someone taking the last version of that open source project and forking it off and taking it in a new direction and we've seen multiple times that that has resulted in great innovation and the original project being left far behind it's a very threatening move that of license changes and forks even with the same licenses they usually have the potential to split the community and create problems yes it's through that in many times the splits that have yeah these forks some of the forks have thrived yeah I think you know like that that benefit of many many different perspectives many different ideas is an important part of why open source is so successful it sort of builds on the licensing the licensing makes it possible um do you have any thoughts on that you know like the community as like a source of rich diversity of ideas making the software stronger over time yeah it's it's something that I have experienced a lot in in my past years but in corporations working for for for profit corporations the the kind of um how difficult it is to implement processes and implement systems where collaboration with customers and users can and and competitors can actually happen it's hard for a lot of companies to to understand that they can that they can that the licenses allow for a community of innovation to happen with your customers and not against them and it and the the practice of how to do that the how to achieve that is is not very well known very few organizations are capable of of doing that sort of collaborative innovation and the other thing is that a lot a lot of companies don't understand the value or what some licenses allow for some actions to happen and some and some other licenses prevent it so for example a lot of um conversations around the copy left versus permissive licenses of which one is more free than other and I don't I don't really care about defining which of the licenses more free a group of licenses more free than another it more interesting to me is what kind of behavior that allows and what kind of modeling of community you can have what kind of of go-to-market strategies are allowed or prevented for by picking one of those licenses that's a more interesting conversation to have for me I think that the diversity that open source empowers is huge it's one of the big benefits of open source is when you can have someone come along to an open source project use it in a way that you never thought they would use it before send changes to add functionality that you didn't even think was possible I mean open source is on Mars right now and I don't think that anyone who was sitting with me back at Linux Expo in 97 thought that was even remotely a possibility and I think that that's that's what makes open source so wonderful is that it empowers people to take it beyond the wildest expectations of the original creator yeah so true I think that's just about all the time we have do you have any closing thoughts I wish we could get more um general and and share the understanding of what the open source what open source means uh for real like we keep on having these conversations and we don't take it for granted we keep on discussing and and and and understand that what the open source definition does and what the open source initiative um a seal of approval on licenses means uh and the value that it brings so that we have all as a community we have a shared understanding of that yeah I think my my takeaway would be to uh to look to the existing pool of open source licenses when you're trying to start off on a project and not try to reinvent your own because it is very easy to get it wrong and the repercussions can be very severe so take advantage of the excellent resources that are out there today uh to codify existing licenses look at the popular licenses they're popular for a reason excellent thanks Stefano and Tom