Copyleft and the Cloud - where do we go from here ?
By
Jeremy Allison
The Samba project has traditionally been one of the strongest proponents of Copyleft licensing and Free Software. However, in the Corporate Cloud-first world we find ourselves, traditional enforcement mechanisms have not been effective. How do we achieve the goals of the Free Software movement in this new world and how do we need to change what we're doing to be successful ?
Monday 11:10 a.m.–11:50 a.m.
Traditional license enforcement doesn't seem to work well in the Cloud and for the modern software environment we find ourselves. In order to achieve the world of Free Software available for all I think we need to change our approach. Both GPLv3 and the AGPL have been rejected soundly by most developers. I would argue that we need a new way to inspire developers to adopt Free Software goals and principles, as depending on licensing has failed as licensing itself has fractured.
Communication and collaboration are key to this. Stand-alone software is essentially useless. Software interoperability and published protocol and communication definitions are essential to build a freedom valuing software industry for the future.
Jeremy Allison
Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an Open Source Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems.
Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liason to companies using the Samba code commercially.
He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work full-time on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and Linux interoperability.
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