Notebook - OSS office at Adobe

2017-05-12 06:46
tl;dr: This post summarises what I learnt at the Adobe Open Source Summit last week about which aspects to think of when running an open source office. It's mainly a mental note for myself, hopefully others will find it useful as well.

Longer version:

This is another post in a series of articles on "random stuff I leant in Basel last week". When I was invited to Adobe's open source summit I had no idea what to expect from it. In retrospect I'm glad I accepted the invitation - it was a great mix of talks, a valuable insight into how others are adopting open source processes and their motivation for open sourcing code and helping out upstream.

The first in a series of talks gave an overview of Adobe's open source office. Currently the expertise collected there includes one human with a software development background, one human with a marketing background and one human with program management background showing the breadth of topics faced when interacting with open source projects.

The self-set goal of these people is to make contributing to open source as easy as possible. That includes making people comfortable internally with the way many open source projects work. It means making (e.g. legal, branding) review processes of contributions internally as easy as possible. It means supporting teams with checking contributions for license conformance, sensitive (e.g. personal) information that shouldn't be shared publicly. It also means supporting teams that want to run their own open source projects.

One idea that I found very intriguing was to run their team through a public github repository, in a sort-of eat-your-own-dogfood kind-of way.

One of the artifacts maintained in that repository is a launch checklist that people can follow which includes reminders for creating a blog post, publishing on the website, sharing information on social media. Most likely those are aspects that are often forgotten even in established projects when it comes to topics like releasing and promoting a new software release version.

Another aspect I found interesting was the creation of an OSS advisory board - a group of people intersted in open development and open source. A wider group of people tasked with figuring out how to best approach open development, how to get the organisation to move away from a private by default strategy towards an open by default way of collaborating across team boundaries.

Many of these topics fit well within what was shared earlier this year in the Linux foundation webcast on how to go about creating an open source office in organisations.

FOSDEM 2014

2014-02-03 14:53
By now FOSDEM turned into some kind of tradition in our family: Since 2007 every year in February we are travelling to that one comfy B&B in Brussels for a weekend - not to take a closer look at the city but to attend (together with thousands of other geeks and open source hackers) one of the biggest conferences on all things open source.

I love the conference concept for scaling: As it happens on a university campus they only have a limited number of huge rooms, but a fairly large number of mid-sized and small rooms. They use the venue to their advantage: Only the main tracks are organised by the official conference organisers. All other rooms are each filled with a community (usually a handful of people doing the heavy lifting of inviting speakers, putting a cfp out etc.) provided track. As a result even though they attract well over 5000 attendees it's only the most popular topics (e.g. Elasticsearch, GPL license discussions, configuration management, JDK specifics, kdbus, discussions on the relevancy of distribution packaging) tend to fill rooms completely.

When stuck with full rooms there's always some other talk on that probably is similarly interesting. In addition there is a huge exhibition area to visit where you can talk to the core developers behind the individual open source projects (and buy stuff like T-Shirts, grab a few flyers, stickers etc.). In addition there's so many people to talk to you usually won't get to see too many presentations anyway. In addition as of this year the crazy people of the FOSDEM (formerly Debian-only) video team managed to get (on a best effort, "hopefully the technician doesn't sleep in after that many beers yesterday" basis) all 445 talks video-taped with the goal of putting these online Monday after the conference.

On top I had the huge advantage of being able to simply follow to the talks my husband would go to if all of the stuff I am interested in is full: That would give me insight to completely different topics but also make it extremely easy for me to identify the good speakers and interesting presentations based on his experience avoiding the "if I'm unfamiliar with the topic and area I usually bump into the boring, badly given talks" problem.

I spent most of Saturday in a few talks on software patents, Daniel Naber's Language Tool, the Jolla BoF, the FLA. The rest of the time I caught up with the FSFE (thanks again for the bringing the onesies!), Debian, Open Office, Lucene and Elasticsearch people. The day ended at the Jolla community dinner - with a waitress that was completely overwhelmed by the number of geeks wanting food, beer and soft drinks.

Sunday I started with Chris Kühl's talk on Memory Tuning Android for Low Memory Devices. After that I helped at the Elasticsearch booth - FOSDEM definitely is an incredibly busy event. But given their target audience also is an interesting mix of people to talk to: Some had no idea about how text search works but came over because they had heard about Wikipedia using the project for search and wanted to know more. Some had a very clear idea of how they could benefit from Lucene for their NLP projects and wanted to know more on how that fits with Elasticsearch. Others were switching from Solr Cloud and needed some advise on how the systems compare for their particular use case. Others again were using Elasticsearch to analyse log files in a distributed fashion and needed advise on how to implement some feature. There was this one guy from Debian I've known ever since helping at the FSFE booth at Chemnitzer Linuxtage back in 2008 I believe who wanted to know more about Elasticsearch because one of his fellow package maintainers had been volunteered to work on the Elasticsearch RFP (#660826 if you are interested in reading more).

Overall (as every year) a really pleasant experience. What was in particular interesting this year was to meet people I knew only from completely other contexts (CCC events, system administrators, core Apache httpd people). Seems like FOSDEM is not only growing bigger but also more diverse.

The only kind of feedback I would provide is to split some dev rooms by finer grained topics to parallelise and scale even better (the Java, NoSQL and configuration management ones come to my mind first but there probably are others as well - of course again this depends on room availability and actual community members volunteering to submit a dev room related to their project in particular).

I'm glad I'm travelling home by train like last year - not only does that give me time to code and write the blog post you are reading just now, it's also comfortable to get rid of the usual sleep deprivation :)

AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04

2013-02-16 20:41
The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn't quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues. In addition it is still rather young and used by few so there is less trust compared to GPL or ASL to last when put on trial. However there's another reason for low adoption:

Those that are being targeted with the license – people developing web services – tend to prefer permissive licenses over copyleft ones (see Django, Rails for example). People are still in the postion of trying to gain strong positions when opening up their infrastructure. As a result there is a general preference for permissive licenses. Also there are many more people working on open source not as their hobby project but as their general day job. As a result the number of people backing projects that are infrastructure only, company driven and trying to establish de-facto standards through the availability of free software is growing.

Depressing for the founders of AGPL are businesses using the AGPL to try and trick corporations into using their software as open source and later go after them with additional clauses in their terms and conditions to enforce subscription based services.

Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03

2013-02-15 22:39
In the next talk Gervase Markham talked about his experience working for Mozilla on legal and license questions. First the speaker summarized what kind of requests he gets most:

  • There are lots of technical support requests.
  • Next on the top list is the question for whether or not shipping Mozilla with a set of modifications is ok.
  • Next is an internal question, namely: Can I use this code?
  • Related to that is the “We have a release in two weeks, can we ship with this code?”
  • Another task is finding code that was used but is not ok.
  • Yet another one is getting code licensed or re-licensed.
  • Maintaining the about:license page is another task.
  • Dealing with ECCV/CCATS requests is another issue that comes up often.


However there are also bigger tasks: There was the goal of tri-licensing Mozilla. The only issue was the fact that they had accumulated enough individually copyrighted contributions to make that that task really tricky. In the end they wrote a tool to pull out all contributor names, send them mails asking for permission to tri-license. After little over three years they had responses from all but 30 contributors. As a result the “find this hacker” campaign was launched on /. and other news sites. In the end most could be found.

As another step towards easier licensing the MPL 2 replacing 1.1 was introduced – it fixes GPL/ASL license incompatibilities, notification and distribution requirements, the difference for initial developers and the use of conditional/Jacobson language.

There are still a few issues with source files lacking license headers (general advise that never has been tested in court is the concept of license bleeding: If there are files with and without license headers in one folder, most likely those w/o have the same license as those with. “aehem” ;)

There are lots of questions on license interpretation. This includes questions from people wanting to use Mozilla licensed software that wasn't even developed within the Mozilla foundation. Also there are lots of people who do not understand the concept of “free does not mean non-commercial use only”.

Sometimes there a license archeology task where people ask “hey, is that old code yours and is it under the Mozilla license?”

Another interesting case was a big, completely unknown blue company asking whether the hunspell module, having changed licenses so often (from BSD forked to GPL, changed to LGPL, to CC-Attr, to the tri license of Mozilla, including changed GPL stuff with the author's permission) really can be distributed by Mozilla under the MPL. After lots of digging through commit logs and change logs they could indeed verify that the code is completely clean.

Then there was the case of Firefox OS which was a fast development effort, involving copying lots of stuff from all over the internet just to get things running. A custom license scanner written to verify all bits and pieces was finally implemented and used to give clearance on release. It found dozens of distinct versions of the Mozilla and BSD licenses (mainly due to the fact that people are invited to add their own name to it when releaseing code). As a result there now is a discussion on OSI to discourage that behaviour to keep the number of individual license files to ship with the software down to a minimal number.

The speaker's general recommendation on releasing small software projects under a non-copyleft license was to use the CC-0 license, for larger stuff his recommendation was to go for the ASL due to its patent grant clauses. Even at Mozilla quite a few projects have switched over to Apache.
There also were a few license puzzlers:

  • OpenJDK asked for permission to use their root-store certificates. Unfortunately at the time of receiving them they had not been given any sort of contract under which they may use them. *ahem*
  • The case with search engine icons … really isn't … so much different.


There also tend to be some questions on the Firefox/Mozilla trademarks ranging from

  • “can I use your logo for purpose such'n'such”?
  • ”Do you have 'best viewed in...' button”? - Nope, as we generally appreciate developers writing web sites that comply with web standards instead of optimizing for one single browser only.
  • They did run into the subscription on download scam trap and could stop those sites due to trademark infringement.
  • Most of this falls under fair use – especially cases like Pearson asking for permission (with a two-page mail + pdf letter) to link to the mozilla web site...


In general when people ask for permission if they do not need to ask: Tell them so but give them permission anyway. This is in order to avoid an “always-ask-for-permission” culture, and really to keep the number of requests down to those that are really necessary. One thing that does need prior permission though is shipping Firefox with a bunch of plugins pre-installed as a complete package.

On Patents – Mozilla does not really have any and spends time (e.g. on OPUS) avoiding them. On a related note there sometimes even are IPO requests.

Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02

2013-02-14 20:38
So the first talk I went to ended up being in the legal dev room on trademarks in open source projects. The speaker had a background mainly in US American trademark law and quite some background when it comes to open source licenses.

To start Pamela first showed a graphic detailing the various types of trademarks: In the pool of generic names there is a large group of trademarks that are in use but not registered. The amount of registered trademarks actually is rather small. The main goal of trademarks is to avoid confusing costumers. This is best seen when thinking about scammers trying to trick users into downloading users pre-build and packaged software from third party servers demanding a credit card number that is later charged based on a subscription service the user signed by clicking away the fine print on the download page. Canonical example seems to be e.g. the Firefox/Mozilla project that was effected by this kind of scam. But also other end-user software (think Libre/Open Office, Gimp) could well be targets. This kind of deceiving web pages usually can be taken down way faster with a cease and desist letter due to trademark infringement rather than due to the fraud they do.

So when selecting trademarks – what should a project look out for? One is the name should not be too generic as that would lead to a name that is not enforceable. It should not be too theme-y as the names that are themed usually are already taken. The time to research should be contrasted with the pain it will cost to rename the project in case of any difficulties.

There are few actual court decisions that relate to trademarks and OSS: In Germany it was decided that forking the ENIGMA project and putting it on set-op boxes but keeping the name was ok for as long as the core function would be kept and third party plugins would still work.

In the US there was a decision that keeping the name of re-furbished SparkPlugs is ok for as long as it is clearly marked what to expect when buying them (in this case re-furbished instead of newly made).

Another thing to keep in mind are trademarks are naked trademarks – those that were not enforced and have become too ubiquitous. In the US that would be the naked license trademarks, in Greece the recycling mark “Der Grüne Punkt” has become too ubiquitous to be treated as a trademark any more.

Trademark law already fails in multinational corporation setups with world wide subsidies. It gets even worse with world wide distributed open source projects. The question of who owns the mark, who is allowed to enforce it, who exercises control gets worse the more development is distributed. When new people take over trademarks there should be some clear paper transferral document to avoid confusion.

Trademarks only deal with avoiding usage confusion: Using the mark when talking about it is completely fine. Phrases like “I'm $mark compatible”, “I'm running on top of $mark” care completely ok. However make sure to use as little as possible – there is no right to also just use the logos, icons or design forms of the project you are talking about – unless you are talking about said logo of course.

So to conclude: respect referential use, you can't exercise full control but should avoid exercising too little control.

There is a missing consistent understanding of and behaviour towards trademarks in the open source community. Now is the time to shape the law according to what open source developers think they need.