October Newsletter /Summit

[Paul Boddie]

On Friday 14. October 2016 14.49.35 Patrick Ohnewein wrote:
> 
> I fully agree. A lessons learned process will help us to learn from this
> kind of events and to find ways to implement more accurate criteria in
> the future. Even if it will never be possible to completely avoid such
> events from happening.
> 
> A good example for me was a talk by Monty at the SFScon13:
> 
> https://www.sfscon.it/talks/free-open-source-software-entrepreneurship/
> 
> He was basically advocating for his Business Source Licensing idea and
> had an animated discussion at the Q&A session with Carlo Piana afterwards.
> 
> I learned that even respected FLOSS people not always deliver a talk
> which is in line with what the organisation team has planned.

Well, Widenius managed to cultivate a reputation from selling his business to 
Sun/Oracle and then demanding that they practically give it straight back to 
him - by advocating that Oracle permissively license the MySQL code - 
presumably so that Widenius' new business could incorporate it into his 
competing product and accompanying proprietary licensing model. (As far as I 
understand and remember the situation. Clarifications and corrections 
welcome!)

There are other people who were aligned with Free Software interests at one 
point in time but who advocate incompatible or hostile interests now, not 
mentioning any names, but I'm sure people can think of some fairly readily. It 
just means that "reputation" isn't necessarily a guarantee of suitability: 
it's the content that matters.

Paul