Conundrucrats, Assemble!

Some people know I’ve been helping The Apache Software Foundation for a long time as Chair of the Apache SpamAssassin project and more recently as an executive officer. I was reading Simon’s article about Open Source Software at: https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/2/phipps-gaming-the-system

It’s a good article but ignore the incorrect statements regarding misread motivations and non-existent backroom deals. It brings up a good understanding of how and why we do things as well as some of the perils of working in OSS.

And three particular issues I wanted to stand on a soap box about:

1) Simon says, “expressing dissent indicates a willingness to personally engage to address the issue.” I agree. You want to complain, offer a better solution. Be prepared to lead, follow or get out of the way because that hill has to be taken by sundown --with or without you. Of course, nothing's stopping you from attacking a different hill. You don’t like it, you aren’t shot as a deserter or court martialed at dawn. Fork the code, gain users and developers, OSS forever.

2) I love a meritocracy. Prove you can do something and others will follow. I don’t care if your title is King or Peasant. It’s worked out for me in life, long before and way outside of Open Source Software. It’s one of those generational things perhaps since I grew up in the Nike “Just Do It” (swoosh)™ era.

3) But why do I support OSS? I earn my living with computers. Isn’t that a conflict of interest like Simon says? I need a good Conflict of Interest Disclosure. So to clear this up, I’ve decided to start a new political party for those like me to join. We’re looking for followers who +1* to the following “I Am”:

• Someone who believes Open Source Software is an amazing way to help the world.
• A high-tech redneck born South of the Smith and Wesson line. (OK, this is an edge case)
• A voter across party lines supporting the best candidate for the job
• A capitalist who despises pure capitalism because the bottom dollar is NOT the bottom line.
• A volunteer in roles that are altruistic or strategic or fun.
• A realist who has kids to feed and earns a paycheck doing both closed and Open Source work.
• Someone who likes the pie-in-the-sky utopian approach but finds that a democratic republic and a meritocracy seem to be work.
• About 2% evil so I can think a little like the bad guys to help protect us from them. (edge case #2)

I figure we’ll call ourselves the Conundrucrats. Conundrucans? Conundrucarians? It’s likely more useful than telling you where I work and my title so you can try and incorrectly interpret my motivations and conflicts of interest.

And it leads to my final point. When doing OSS, do you want to use the Apache License or something like the GNU Public License? I’ve done work under both and support both. I find that the GPL is more idealist. It promotes the idea of Copyleft where you have to open source your modifications. The Apache License is a little more realist where it knows we aren’t a utopian society.

Dreas van Donselaar of SpamExperts summed it up nicely: “start with the Apache License and if I ever feel bad about that, switch to GPLv3. The other way around would not be possible after thousands of idealist programmers committed their improvements.”

As Dreas is Dutch, he won’t be joining my political party any time soon, but we both found it interesting that the businesses want the more idealistic solution likely to prevent competition but the developers chose the more realistic solution likely because they have kids to feed.

Regards,

KAM

[*] https://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html and http://apache.org/foundation/voting.html