I’m celebrating the end of my portion of my trial by … spending all weekend in meetings, specifically the OSI’s annual face-to-face board meeting, which we’re holding this year in Chicago1. It’s been a very productive meeting so far, with lots of good discussion about both our vision and our plan for attacking the future. The organization still has a long way to go but there is a lot of potential here.
In the past, I’ve been known to say that skeptical things about the Open Source Initiative’s role in the open source world – usually arguing that OSI was doing the basics (license approval, open source definition) respectably, but also had a lot of potential that wasn’t being taken advantage of. I’m excited to announce that I’m now putting my money where my mouth is, and joining the OSI board of directors.
“Hello, My Name is Open Source” by opensourceway, used under CC-BY-SA license
I’ll write more about my goals for OSI (and for my participation in it) in the coming months, once I’ve gotten a chance to actually meet with the rest of the board and better understand the projects that are already underway. But right now I think it’s very important to note how I became a member of the board, because I think it says something important about where OSI is going, and about why I agreed to invest my time and energy.
Specifically, at FOSDEM, OSI announced that it was beginning to shift in part to an affiliate model, where open source organizations like Mozilla, KDE, and others would have input into OSI’s processes and decisionmaking.1 One of the first tangible outcomes of that process was to ask affiliate orgs to nominate board members. The result: Mozilla nominated me, and Eclipse nominated fellow new board member Mike Milinkovich. Because of this, our election is less about us,2 and more about taking very concrete steps towards an OSI with deeper ties to the broader open source community. And that, I think, reflects what OSI has not always been, but could be – a place where the best of open source can talk and work together to move common interests forward.
After the release of MPL 2, the first request for MPL 2.1 came from someone who didn’t want to put copyright headers in individual files. The issue has recently reared its head in Apache as well, and I recently was asked related questions by a GPL user as well.
The main reasons given for not using per-file headers are two-fold:
The case for per-file copyright headers is put well, and succinctly, by Larry Rosen:
“[O]ur goal is to pass on any important IP information that might be useful … in the place(s) [downstream licensees] are most likely to find it.”
Larry’s comment makes two assumptions that I want to flesh out and support.
First, Larry assumes that the place where people are “most likely to find” licensing information is in per-file headers. It is true that in the best case scenario in many modern languages/frameworks, library-level is a great place to put licenses – in normal use, they’ll get seen and understood. But lots of coding in the wild is not “normal use.” I review a lot of different codebases these days, and files get separated from their parent projects and directories all the time. And then you have to use fairly complex (and often expensive) tools to do what should be a simple task- figure out what the license is. So, yes, modern frameworks should in theory reduce the need for per-file licensing information – but in practice, that is often not the case.
Second, Larry assumes that you actually want people to use your code. Lots of publishers of open source code seem surprisingly unconcerned by this, unfortunately. The functional, practical benefits of open source all start with someone else reusing your code, so if you’re publishing open source code at all, you should be concerned about making it easy for people to use the code you publish. Again, putting licensing information in each file can help make this easier, by making it easier for people to figure out their rights and responsibilities. (This is particularly true if you want commercial uptake, since so many commercial users of open source are getting more conservative about using source code that is not properly labeled and licensed.)((Larry also perhaps assumes you want people to respect your license when using your code; that is a surprisingly complex topic that I will try to address some other day.))
So, yes: if you want people to find your licensing information, and to use your code, per-file headers are the way to go. They may not be ideal but they really are worth the effort.
Based on my series of MPL posts for opensource.com, I’ve been nominated for a “people’s choice award” as a top contributor to opensource.com. It’s a nice little honor. That said, there are lots of folks on the list of nominees who have written and thought far more than I have this year- so you should go check out the list and vote for one of them instead :)
The best thing I did for myself in 2011 was to get back on a bicycle after not being on one for 15+ years, and after never actually being comfortable on one. I’m not going to be racing any time soon, but I now really look forward to a bike ride as part of the average weekend and even the average vacation.
Yesterday was a nice punctuation mark to that, featuring a long ride down to the ocean, a great view, and a very satisfying fish and chips.
I am definitely enjoying some time out of the office and looking forward to a great 2012- hope my friends are too. Now I just need to figure out what life improvement can trump “get back on a bike.” Suggestions welcome :)
A few months ago I bought “Typography for Lawyers” (TFL), an excellent book that I would recommend to all lawyers. And since the biggest document I was working on at the timeis, of course, published in HTML, I started spending a few minutes here and there on learning enough CSS to make the license look better. (Understandably, the book’s very pragmatic advice is focused on Word and Pages, not HTML.)
Fine Print by CJ Sorg, used under CC-BY 2.0I’ve published the experiment (Compare with the plain-jane HTML MPL 1.1). This is just an experiment and a personal hack, but I’m happy to hear more suggestions and improvements, and if the final result works, I’ll suggest we use it instead of the traditional plain HTML version. Some notes on the process, including links to the (abbreviated) blog posts at the TFL website (for much more thought and detail, buy the book):
Of course, I’m still very bad with CSS and HTML, so I’m sure this document can be improved, and I’m happy to take suggestions and fixes. Regardless, it has been an educational experience for me and I’m glad I toyed with it.
I’m excited to say that (with Krissa’s support and approval) I donated today to the Ada Initiative’s Seed 100 Campaign.
Free and open software and culture have been very good to me, and I’m glad that the Mary and Val (and hopefully soon a fleet of others) will be working to make it more accessible to women and girls. As big a force for change as this movement has been in the past two decades, things can only improve when we consciously work on being accessible to the 50% of the population that is currently all too often excluded.
Saw this for the first time on my drive to work yesterday:
Not every venture is about capital, by Fligtar, used under CC-BY-NC-SA
Congrats to all my friends on a very solid release and on reinvigorating their important message of public service.
I’m still working, albeit sometimes slowly, on the new MPL. Two days ago we announced the release of Beta 2- you should go read it :)
FAQ, by photosteve101/planetofsuccess.com, used under CC-BY
Besides the usual (small tweaks to some language in a further attempt to get it Just Right; improvements to the GPL language; etc.) I also published a bit of an experiment: a draft of the license which replaces the traditional section headers with FAQ questions, like so:
Traditional:
2.2. Grants. Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license: . . .
FAQ-style:
2. What rights are granted to me by this license? Who are these rights granted by? Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license: . . .
The inspiration for this came from the apartment lease I signed in December, which was done in this style and (oddly) almost a pleasure to read.
This approach has two advantages. First, it helps you draft and organize things more clearly. Since every paragraph was the answer to a question, things were broken up into what normal human beings would consider more logical units, instead of the giant blocks of text legal documents sometimes sprawl into. Preparing the FAQified version of Beta 2 made us aware of some MPL sections that had this problem, and it helped us reorder and reorganize text as a result- something which you can see in (for example) the new Section 8 of MPL 2 Beta 2, which is part of the old Section 9 broken out so that it makes more sense independently. Because of this, these changes will help every reader of the license, even if we never publish another “FAQified” version.
Second, the questions clue a reader in to the key concepts of a section. It is important that people still read everything. We’ve tried to ensure that the questions do not change the meaning of the “answers;” i.e., the body of the text, both by ensuring that the “answer” or body text is the same between both versions and by disclaiming any changes in the license itself. In other words, this will help non-lawyers understand- but if for some reason, you need to be absolutely sure, you (and possibly your lawyer) need to read the whole thing carefully and without reference to the questions.
We’re looking forward to feedback on this, both from non-lawyers (does this help you understand?) and from lawyers (this is an unusual technique, and so suggestions on how to do it better are welcome). So download it, read it, and let us know what you think.
[postscript: The first comment reminds me that this is only one of the steps we've taken to simplify and clarify the license. Most notably, Beta 2 is almost exactly 1/2 the length of MPL 1.1, but we've also worked with Mozilla folks to simplify requirements where the old license was over-specific, and with lawyers with a reputation for good writing on how to simplify language and remove redundancy. But there is still time to make it even better, so please continue reading and giving feedback!]
Just a note to say that I’ve been invited to join the W3C‘s Patents and Standards Interest Group as an Invited Expert. I’m pretty pleased by this and am looking forward to contributing immediately. Invited Experts speak for themselves, not other organizations, so I will not be representing Mozilla or anyone else, but hopefully I’ll be able to add something to the discussion on my own and help move W3C and the open web forward.