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OSS: Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW), Molly de Blanc on 'Breaking Up', Apache Software Foundation News and Beancount Examined

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of April 2019 08:19:22 AM Filed under
OSS
  • Business models and open source

    One of the more lively sessions that was held at the 2019 Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) was Heather Meeker's talk on open-source business models and alternative licensing. As a lawyer in private practice, Meeker worked on a number of the alternative licenses that were drafted and presented over the last year or so. But she is also part of a venture capital (VC) firm that is exclusively investing in companies focused on open source, so she has experience in thinking about what kinds of models actually work for those types of businesses.

    The LLW is organized annually by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). It is meant as a gathering for lawyers, engineers, and others interested in licensing topics. By default, sessions are run under the Chatham House Rule, which means that participants cannot be identified, either by name or affiliation. Meeker waived that rule for her talk, though those from the audience who made comments may or may not have waived the rule.

    Meeker acknowledged that her topic was controversial, but that she would be "your Beatrice [from the Divine Comedy] to the miasma of venture-backed open-source companies". Her slides were entitled "What color are your razor blades? FOSS business models". The title is referencing the famous What Color is Your Parachute? book for job seekers. The idea is to imagine an idea with specificity, so open-source companies need to imagine what they are selling (their "razor blades") with specificity in order to be successful.

    Otherwise, she said, they end up with the business model of the Underpants Gnomes ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit"). For a long time, there was a tendency for open-source entrepreneurs to equate "lots of downloads" with profit, which is more or less the same thing. That is not really going to happen unless a lot of thought is put into how the business will actually function.

  • Molly de Blanc: breaking up

    FLOSS is about choice (among other things). One of the things we get from developer freedom is the ability to specialize or have specialized technology — the development of features and tools, the fixing of bugs and anti-features.

  • Apache Software Foundation Advances Enterprise App Development With Top Level Projects

    The open source Netbeans Java Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) and SkyWalking application performance monitoring (APM) project efforts move forward.

    Open source is often at the core of modern enterprise applications and few if any organizations have as much impact as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

    The Apache Software Foundation runs its open source projects on a hierarchy of principally three levels, top-level projects (TLPs), sub-projects and incubated projects. Achieving the TLP status is a major milestone for an open source effort. Among the projects that have recently achieved TLP status is the Apache Netbeans Java Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) and the Apache Skywalking application performance monitoring (APM) efforts.

  • Counting corporate beans

    Some things simply take time. When your editor restarted the search for a free accounting system, he had truly hoped to be done by now. But life gets busy, and accounting systems are remarkably prone to falling off the list of things one wants to deal with in any given day. On the other hand, accounting can return to that list quickly whenever LWN's proprietary accounting software does something particularly obnoxious. This turns out to be one of those times, so your editor set out to determine whether beancount could do the job.
    Beancount was already covered here almost exactly one year ago, but that review was focused on personal finances; company accounting has a different set of requirements. That article is worth reviewing, though, as the material covered there will (mostly) not be repeated here. Here, instead, the emphasis will be on what a simple business needs.

    At the top of the list is the ability to import data into the system and to get it back out again. An ongoing business has a long accounting history that needs to be present going forward. Beancount keeps all of its data in a plain-text file with a well-documented format, so both import and export are relatively easy. Building on the the tools written to extract data from QuickBooks, your editor was able to write a script to import the accounting database into beancount over the course of an hour or two.

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