Indeed – I would agree that LiMo’s governance is honest and pragmatic. In fact, LiMo is perhaps the only open-source-related industry body that fully shares its governance practices (unlike OHA where governance is obscured or Symbian where governance models are still under development and not ).

The presentation from LiMo you linked to refers to the IPR safe harbour. However, it does not do elucidate the complexity of contributing code to LiMo, the contractual/financial requirements, or the low level of downstream influence that contributing code entails.

Again, it’s a question of shedding some (comprehensive) light on what exactly LiMo’s governance does and doesn’t allow you to do, as its governance rules are rather complex.

Maciej,

The diagram is meant to imply that WebKit is not *controlled* by a single company but *influenced* by a single company (influence as in non-exclusive, majority control). Last time I checked there were roughly 25 contributors/reviewers from Apple and only circa 4 from Nokia, 4 from Torch and 1 from Google. This is essence creates a virtual ‘center of gravity’ around Apple’s contributions to the tip of the tree, making Apple effectively the central influence point for WebKit. I would welcome a guest post to clarify how exactly WebKit works if I ‘m mistaken on any of the above.

Stefano,

Interesting to hear about the controversy between FSF and Raymond on whether the FSF is a Cathedral – the same Cathedral characterisation would apply to Android based on the very same principles.

And I couldn’t agree more on the need to focus on the user’s (developer’s) autonomy and the original freedoms, but considering the repercussions that restrictive governance models have on these freedoms (e.g. openness to contributions).

Andreas

indeed governance and licenses are two very different things. Free Software Foundation has long been criticises by some of the founders of Open Source Initiative (mainly Eric Raymond, which called FSF the cathedral –contrary to popular belief that the cathedral is Microsoft) because of its tight governance control over what code could go into GNU C Compiler or GNU Lib C.

Nowadays the twist that many groups have given to their so-called open source offering is convincing me that the term ‘open source’ has done its job and we should all get back to focus on user’s autonomy and the original freedoms. (BTW, you didn’t mention the fundamental freedom to run the software for any purpose, commercial or not. It’s a basic freedom). The questions we should ask when shopping for software is how autonomous am I going to be? Will I be able to fork or keep the software and buy the service somewhere else?

cheers
stef

Similar to what I think your diagram says .. I think the limo model for open source is more honest and pragmatic … since it acknowledgesgovernance, IPR etc http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/standards/ws08ipr/presentations/23dietrich_en.pdf what do you think?

It may not be exactly ‘open source’ (in fact its called collaborative source from memory) but at least it addresses the issue(in contrast Android does not)

thoughts?

kind rgds Ajit

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