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Welcome to virtuallinux.org. You are currently reading the article "Mission Accomplished: Do We Need the New OSDL?". All articles on virtuallinux.org pertain to the ongoing assult on the worlds greatest Operating system. Continue on reading about "Mission Accomplished: Do We Need the New OSDL?"
Mission Accomplished: Do We Need the New OSDL?
Posted on Friday, December 08 2006 @ 17:06:22 EST by linuxwiz |
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Anonymous writes "Since 2000, the non-profit Open Source Development Lab has been a
champion of Linux and Open Source in enterprise environments. Primarily
an engineering-focused organization, the consortium is generally
regarded as a boon to the Open Source community and a positive force in
the mainstreaming of OSS.
The environment that the OSDL rose up in has greatly changed in the
last several years. Today, Linux is without a doubt a trusted part of
enterprise infrastructure, as validated by its most aggressive competitor.
That's a tremendous shift from the mindset of 2000 and this week the
OSDL felt that change with the loss of their CEO, Stuart Cohen, who
leaves to work at a venture capital firm based in Portland and Seattle.
In addition to this the OSDL laid off a third of its staff as they seek
to redirect their efforts away from engineering and toward becoming a
legal support organization.
This isn't a completely new area for the OSDL. The original Linux
Legal Defense Fund was established in early 2004 in the wake of the SCO
lawsuit to protect Linux end users, ODSL, Linus Torvalds, and Andrew
Morton. That fund, however, will need to be reallocated in light of
recent events.
Last week saw the near outright dismissal of what remains of the SCO
trial as a judge upheld previous rulings and tossed out the bulk of
SCO's "evidence." For a complete breakdown of the ruling, we recommend
visiting Groklaw.
The long and the short of it is that the SCO lawsuit against IBM is
over. Baseless to begin with, we should hope to never see its like
again in the US courts. And if we don't, what of the OSDL's legal
ambitions?
Nearly every vendor provides some form Open Source indemnification
to its end users these days. The vendors themselves should be capable
of taking care of lawsuits aimed at their own company and putting
methodologies in place too ensure that such lawsuits should never come
to light. What's left to protect? Independent developers?
The organization, which isn't currently commenting on the changes,
offered this in a statement as a key area of focus following the reorg:
[To provide] increased legal support for Linux and open source
to account for licensing and patent issues that are increasing in
complexity; this expansion will complement our current initiatives such
as the Patent Commons, Osapa.org, the Linux Legal Defense Fund, and
other projects.
Without a doubt, intellectual property issues surrounding Open
Source are more complex now than they have been in the past due in
large part to the enormous volume of code currently in open
circulation. But how real are the threats of litigation? Does the
OSDL's focus make these implied threats more real than they actually
are?
The OSDL's initial mandate -- "To accelerate the deployment of Linux
for enterprise computing..." -- created a situation where their success
would invalidate their mission. That situation has come to pass and we
now find the OSDL in the position not of creating something new but
rather reacting to what currently amounts to legal boogeymen.
I suppose the new OSDL is a bit like an Open Source Fire Department.
I wonder how long it will be before they tire of responding to false
alarms.
Source"
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