April 26, 2011

This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

Running time: 01:02:48.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:34)

Bradley is still recovering from a rhinovirus which he didn't take care of and also made him sicker, which explains the problems with his voice. In fact, the coughing in the background during Fontana's talk is all Bradley. He apologizes. (00:50)

This show is Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2011 talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement. (03:24)

Segment 1 (03:48)

Richard Fontana's slides for his talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement are available on his website. (04:29)

Bradley was live-denting Fontana's LCS talk. (04:31)

Richard Fontana is the purveyor of the disturbing group on identi.ca. (04:30)

Fontana makes reference to a Bradley's blog post on switching back to Debian from Ubuntu. (05:55)

Fontana pointed out that the GNU Manifesto deals a lot with how !Free Software is completely compatible with many business models. (12:30)

Fontana pointed out that many of the relationships between companies in FaiF software have great variability in level of transparency. (16:00)

In the background, you hear Bradley saying something. He's giving Josh Berkus credit for the phrase throw code over the wall, a phrase which both Fontana and Bradley now use regularly. (32:28)

Segment 2 (48:25)

Fontana made an interesting analogy to commissioned art and its similarity to FLOSS. (50:33)

Fontana noted later on identi.ca that he does support non-profit as solution to entanglement problem. (54:48)

Bradley mentioned the 60 Minutes story about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (CAI) (55:30)

Fontana now talking about GE/NBC relationship, but Bradley was surprised that . Fontana didn't mention Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (18:26, 56:30)

Bradley was glad that Fontana called proprietary relicensing illegitimate. Bradley points out that sometimes community members, including himself, have too easily forgiven business models on the edges of software freedom. (25:13, 30:50 58:30)

Tags: fontana, red hat, non-profits, conferences, governance

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March 15, 2011

Bradley and Karen have an introductory discussion on how non-profit governance interacts with Free Software projects and what issues are important for developers who want their project to have a non-profit existence.

Running time: 00:34:42.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:37)

• Bradley and Karen began the discussion by commenting on this blog post by Andy Updegrove about non-profit governance. (01:50)
• Bradley and Karen tend to agree that non-profit settings are better places to foster and help Free Software development. (03:40)
• Bradley mentioned that Roland McGrath wrote GNU C Library (and other GNU programs) while working as an employee at the FSF, and many of those programs are now often maintained by Red Hat (or other company's) developers, under the auspices of the GNU project, as overseen by the FSF. (04:50)
• Corporate form and organization questions should be secondary to project leadership ones. (09:50)
• One of the most important things is to have an organization in a place where people are willing to do the work to keep the organization going. (20:10)
• Enthusiasm to keep the organization running is the most important resource for running the organization. (22:26)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, fsf, conservancy, non-profits, governance