Open Source is Not A Business Model with VM Brasseur

About VM Brasseur

VM (aka Vicky) spent most of her twenty-plus years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, providing technical management and leadership consulting for small and medium businesses, and helping companies understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open source software in a way that's good for both their bottom line and for the community. Now, as the Director of Open Source Strategy for Juniper Networks, she leverages her nearly 30 years of free and open source software experience and a strong business background to help Juniper be successful through free and open source software.

She is the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the first and only book to detail how to contribute to free and open source software projects. The book is published by The Pragmatic Programmers and is now available at https://fossforge.com.

Vicky is a moderator and author for opensource.com, an author for Linux Journal, the former Vice President of the Open Source Initiative, and a frequent and popular speaker at free/open source conferences and events. She's the proud winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O’Reilly Open Source Award (2016). She blogs about free/open source, business, and technical management at {anonymous => 'hash'};.

Links

Transcript

Mike Julian: This is the Real World DevOps podcast and I'm your host Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps. From the creators of your favorite tools, to the organizers of amazing conferences. From the authors of great books, to fantastic public speakers, I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks in InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools and this is where Influx comes in. Personally I'm a huge fan of their products, and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with our time series database, InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraf for metrics collection from systems, Chronograf for visualization and Kapacitor for real time streaming. All of this is available as open source, and they also have a hosted commercial version, too. You can check all of this out at influxdata.com.

Hi folks, I'm Mike Julian your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. My guest this week is VM Brasseur otherwise known as Vicky, an expert in open source strategy and the author of the book Forge Your Future with Open Source. She's previously the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative and currently Director of Open Source Strategy at Juniper Networks. Well Vicky thanks for coming on the show.

Vicky Brasseur: Well thanks for having me Mike, I'm very happy to be here.

Mike Julian: I want to start with a seemingly simple question, but I have recently learned in the past half hour that this is more complex than it seems. What is open source?

Vicky Brasseur: Yeah, can't imagine how you learned that. No, it's a question that a lot of folks in technology think they know the answer to, but unfortunately they're usually wrong. That's because they usually don't realize that there is a legitimate definition of what it means to be open source software. It is called the open source definition. It is maintained by the Open Source Initiative. If something does not adhere to each of those 10 points on the open source definition, it isn't really open source.

Unfortunately people just sort of assume, well if my source is out there, if my source code is out there, it's open, right? Well, not really, because if you restrict it in any way or if you don't put an appropriate license on it, then people don't know it's open source. If you just put your code out there without a license for instance, it's all rights reserved. You have the copyright over that code or your company if you developed it for your company. It's all rights reserved as far as copyright and no one else can use it, unless you put a license on and that's what the license does for you. Only an open source license, one that is approved by the Open Source Initiative, that's the only kind that you can be assured actually gives you all of the things that the open source definition guarantees.

Mike Julian: What's really interesting about that is, there's always people that go around GitHub onto like the main project and say, "Hey, I noticed that you don't have this license, you should really have a license file." I'd always thought that that was just kind of an oversight, like, "Oh yeah, it's fine, it's totally open source. There's just no license. There's no license file." What you're actually telling us is that, if you don't have that, if you haven't specified what license this is under, by default it's not open source. Like, it is “all rights reserved.”

Vicky Brasseur: It is, exactly. It is all rights reserved. The best you can call it is source available. You still retain all of the copyright over that, and therefore it is all rights reserved. You retain all rights to that code, no one can use that software at all unless you give them the rights to it. That means somebody could use your software and put themselves at legal risk by violating the copyright of your software and you. If you don't put a license on it, that's what they're doing. Therefore, they are at legal risk, they can get sued and if they are running a company and they're using your software, they can't really get acquired frankly if they are using software that is encumbered by somebody else's copyright. That's why it's so important for multiple reasons to make sure you have a license on there. It really takes care of all those legalities. It's a relatively short list of OSI approved licenses, you've got the Apache and the MIT and all your GPL flavors and LGPL and AGPL and yeah. There's a bunch of them and they cover a broad swath of things. If you just use one of them, you don't have to care about the legalities, somebody has already taken the time to figure that out for you.

Professional lawyers have written these things, gotten them approved by OSI. You know they give you everything from the open source definition and you know it's legal. Just use it. It's pretty easy.

Mike Julian: You just named off a whole bunch of different open source licensing. I'm always confused when I release a project, like what should I license this under? Screw it, I'll go with MIT or Apache and call it a day, and I never really put any thought i...