AEI-Brookings has released new research by Professor Alan MacCormack from Harvard Business School on FOSS developers’ approach to licensing- A Developers Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License, May 2007. The study arises from MacCormack’s view that developers’ perspectives have informed little in crafting the forthcoming GPLv3, a strange paradox as the Free Software Foundation considers itself the voice of the developer community, and a stark contrast to the touted ideals of the Free Software Foundation.

Based on extensive interviews, MacCormack finds that the Free Software Foundation's goals in GPLv3 may represent the interests of as little as 10% of the developer community, including those involved in FOSS projects such as JBoss, Apache, Linux Kernel, MySQL, Apache Geronimo, XenSource, and PostgreSQL.

Developers interviewed by MacCormack see value in accommodating closed source software code and in improving interoperability between open and closed code for the benefit of the consumer market and the IT ecosystem. FOSS developers are concerned with “flexibility, choice and freedom” in the development and commercial process. There is little support for any dogmatic vision of good and evil espoused by the Free Software Foundation. Developers do not view licenses in terms of political or philosophical valuations, and often note the drawbacks of restrictive licenses.

MacCormack reports other important characteristics of FOSS developers that suggest an emerging rift as the FOSS movement gets more mainstream, while the Free Software Foundation gets ever more fanatical.

1. Most interviewees use open source licenses to tap into the open source development approach... their focus is on developing a great product rather than a moral imperative to ensure that all software is “free”

2. Most interviewees value the ability to build on the works of others, and believe license incompatibility makes it harder to incorporate other people’s code into their own

3. Developers want the flexibility to vary the license they use for their own code based on need (e.g. dual licensing); they often choose licenses to increase adoption without concern over ensuring the code is never used for commercial gain or proprietary purposes

4. Many interviewees have worked on both open source and non-open source software, and value interaction between the two

5. Developers often exercise this flexibility to solve practical problems for customers

6. ...developers do not support any organization imposing their views upon other developers or abridging other developers’ rights. Most developers are... aligned with [OSI’s] open source definition, which focuses on allowing users to extend open source creations, but avoids mandating users strictly adhere to... philosophies...

MacCormack, whose work I've read for years, does an excellent job of uncovering the views of a FOSS developer community that is more considerate and reasonable than other indications may suggest. However, this study reminds us of a crucial issue: when the Free Software Foundation claims it represents the interests of the community, who exactly is it taking about? In my view, when the Free Software Foundation claims to preserve the rights of the community, its talking about itself- many FOSS developers may agree.

posted by Noel Le @ 2:56 PM | Free Culture Movement

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