Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/06/20/new-again.html
I was invited last week to keynote at
the Sixth
OpenFOAM Conference held at Penn State University in State College,
PA. OpenFOAM is
a computational
fluid dynamics software package released
under GPLv3. I was
grateful for this opportunity, because rarely do I get the opportunity
to meet what I think of as insulated Free Software communities.
By “insulated”, I don’t mean that these communities are
naïve in any way. They are, however, insulated from the usual
politics of the general software freedom community. While the users of
OpenFOAM are all familiar with GNU/Linux and other interesting software
freedom packages, OpenFOAM users and developers aren’t generally reading
blogs like mine or following the weekly discussions about copyleft and
non-copyleft licensing, or debating
with Simon Phipps
what “Open By
Rule” means.
These users and developers interact with one software freedom license,
GPLv3, about one specific codebase. All of there focus comes about that
codebase and how the licensing impacts their businesses, their work and
their research. This is as it should be: some of the best work in
society comes out of communities focusing together very intently on an
important area of study.
For me, it’s quite interesting to see how these communities sometimes,
quite organically, end up having some serious similarities to other ones
we find. As I began to research the history of the OpenFOAM, I started
as I usually do with
the Wikipedia entry,
which is (at the time of
writing) marked
with the Advert template. This was an immediate sign that something
odd was going on, so I dug deeper.
Between my research before the workshop and from discussions with users
and developers at it, I’ve pretty much gotten a straight,
non-advertising story of what happened. The OpenFOAM codebase was
developed at Imperial College as an academic codebase. As often
(unfortunately) happens, the university allowed the codebase to be spun
off as a proprietary software product into a for-profit company.
Eventually, in 2004, the codebase was released under GPL. After usual
corporate politics and disputes that our community has seen before, a
single corporation, OpenCFD, Ltd., now maintains itself as sole
copyright holdership and trademark holdership of the OpenFOAM name.
As such, events have progressed as we have all seen before with MySQL,
and other would-be community projects that have ended up under single
corporate control. OpenCFD maintains
a proprietary
relicensing business model, a practice that I’ve previously
denounced. Also, there is aggressive trademark enforcement and
licensing control going on, which we have also seen more than once in
the software freedom world.
However, despite this, I’m actually quite hopeful about this community
I met last week, despite how grim the last paragraph sounds. I theorize
this has something do with the heavy academic connections of the
project, but for whatever reason, there is
a burgeoning but reasonably
healthy fork, currently called OpenFOAM-Extend, with a community of
academics, volunteer developers, and small businesses interested in it.
They are in the classic catbird seat when facing a proprietary
relicensed codebase: they can take all they want from the official
OpenFOAM releases under GPLv3, and can add their own code without
assigning it back to OpenCFD and keeping their own copyrights. I
encouraged everyone I met at the conference to do this.
The community faces really only one difficult obstacle: they will
eventually have to give up the name, OpenFOAM. The name is trademarked
by OpenCFD, and therefore there will always be difficult trying to build
a healthy software freedom community around a project whose name is
trademarked and aggressively enforced by a for-profit company. I spent
my time at the workshop pointing out that a name is just a moniker and
that developers and users will gravitate to wherever the healthiest
codebase lives, regardless of a name. I pointed out how forks of MySQL
like Drizzle have easily built
communities, and encouraged OpenFOAM users to watch with interest what
happens with other fork+name-change projects
like LibreOffice
and Jenkins. I hope the
OpenFOAM-Extend community will take these examples to heart.
Finally, I’d like to thank the OpenFOAM Workshop organizers for
inviting me to keynote at their sixth annual event. I enjoyed meeting
everyone at the workshop. I’ve put
the slides from talk
there on my website. I also hope to release the recording of my
talk as Free as in Freedom
oggcast, but I have discuss that with my co-host Karen Sandler
before I do.
