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In the technology industries, licensing is a form of knowledge-exchange and collaboration. Licensing plays a critical role as technologies grow more complex, and competition for innovation gets more intense. Firms must focus on what they're good at, and license from others what they're not. Yet, licensing is a simple concept- private contracting that induces flexibility into commercial transactions. For every innovation in the market, dozens or hundreds of different licenses cover the features-functions.
With the role of licensing in the technology industries, it is not surprising that Microsoft wants to leverage licensing agreements for greater interoperability between its technologies and FOSS technologies. Recent statements from a Microsoft executive, Horacio Gutierrez: "The only way that's possible [interoperability] is for companies to really be open to licensing arrangements and building these bridges that people thought were impossible before, among different providers and among different software development models." Cool, so everybody wins with interoperability through licensing agreements, right? Technologies would come together, consumers and Microsoft would benefit. FOSS firms would also benefit, but they face some challenges.
I imagine one primary reason FOSS firms would not immediately warm to Microsoft's efforts to form licensing partnerships: FOSS technologies may suffer from the problem of too many informal inputs from outside the firm. The costs and complexities of clearing FOSS licenses may be too daunting for FOSS firms, and thus undercut the very basis of why they rely on "free inputs" (volunteer programmers). FOSS firms would face untested challenges in negotiating any IP agreement- they don't own the IP, much less be able to track down the source, and if they do track down the source of their code they may be hamstrung anyways.
If I were suspicious, I would say that the Free Software Foundation is aware of these licensing challenges for FOSS firms. And rather than allow the weakness of FOSS firms to manifest, which would likely occur as more FOSS firms negotiate with Microsoft, the Free Software Foundation would try to prevent/eliminate licensing agreements bridging proprietary and FOSS technologies altogether.
The Free Software Foundation claims its interest is to protect the "community," yet it seems the Foundation may be protecting a weakness that would deem the FOSS community unviable for mass diffusion in society: the inability for diverse and flexible contracting. Still, I'm not sure what is worse- facing particular challenges in licensing, or being unwilling to when greater interoperability (a big selling point of FOSS!) would result.
posted by Noel Le @ 8:09 PM | Patents
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