I’ve been a follower of the open source software movement for some years, although as a non-techie I have less claim on the OSS culture than certain friends and colleagues.   Still, it’s a fascinating realm for an intellectual property lawyer / student of organizational behavior.

It’s also produced a range of software that I find myself using often, or even daily.   So I thought I’d take a minute to inventory the open source projects on which I rely.  Turns out to be a long list:

Office Productivity

• OpenOffice.org desktop office suite.
• KeepNote list and note-taking application.
• Feng Office virtual office suite (especially for its contact management / CRM capabilities).
• Firefox web browser.
• Thunderbird email reader.
• PDFsam tool for splitting and reassembling PDF files.  (When you need it, you need it.)
• Whyteboard paint program for annotating PDFs.
• PDFCreator print driver to create PDFs.
• GNUCash double-entry bookkeeping.
  

Music

• MuseScore editor for complex music notation.
• Audacity audio recording and editing program.

Imaging

• Inkscape vector illustration tool.
• Gimp photo editor.
• Debugmode FrameServer video post-production tool which serves individual frames of video from one program to another.  (An oddly useful thing to do, as it turns out.)

Web publishing

• FileZilla FTP client.
• PuTTY.  Nope, I’m not afraid of the command line.  (Yup, I probably should should be.)

Under the hood

• 7-zip file compression utility.
• LAMP web server stack.

The kicker is, of course, that each of these projects was developed using non-traditional economic models.  Some are easy to grasp: a big software company like Sun decides to release their in-house office suite; programmers need base tools (like LAMP) for other work, so they invent clever ways to collaborate and piece those tools together; a guy in his dorm room captures a following among fellow hackers.

But I’d submit that there’s more to even the obvious stories: how these projects gained traction outside the original developer’s head; how they got good enough for daily use; how they turned the organizational corner into a sustained and active development community.

Clever use of copyright law is part of these stories.  OSS lives by combining the rights of copyright ownership with very particular licensing terms: code can be redistributed, but only subject to conditions that keep future developments open source.  So OSS isn’t a donation-based model that only works for techno-hippies.  It’s, instead, a brilliant application of law and economics — just one that’s more complex than “I make software and you buy it from me.”

The result is, at least potentially, spontaneous organization.  And a lot of great software.

Open source licensing is important — and often overlooked, to the detriment of the community.  In many cases, license provisions are easy to follow, but here’s a puzzle:

This blog runs (1) on WordPress, using (2) Joshua Sowin’s implementation of (3) the Blueprint CSS framework.  Each of these three credits represents an excellent piece of work, but each uses a different open source license: WordPress uses the GPL; Sowin uses Creative Commons; and Blueprint uses a modified MIT license.

Sowin is right to apply his choice of license to his work as derived from Blueprint — the generous terms of the MIT license allow him to do that.

But his work is also derived from WordPress itself, at least arguably: here’s a post arguing that any theme used on WordPress has to be licensed under the GPL, subject to the GPL’s particular permissions and restrictions.  The comments are as interesting as the post itself — exemplary of the confusion that can come into a puzzle like this, and of the stakes involved.

What’s a licensing developer to do?  WordPress provides an answer in a posted legal opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center, but it’s complicated: PHP files have to be GPL’d; other elements don’t.

Not a very clean answer, and one that warrants further discussion here.  Watch for updates as I flesh out this draft discussion.

Meantime, as the grateful user of Sowin’s work, my job is easier to parse  (I don’t think you have to be a lawyer to figure this out): give credit where credit is due.  That’s why, of course, you see each 0f the above three credits in this site’s footer.