Proposed Charter for OpenSource^WTools WG

Olaf,

On Tuesday, 2012-10-16 10:27:58 +0200, 
Olaf Kolkman <olaf at NLnetLabs.nl> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 15, 2012, at 6:57 PM, Shane Kerr <shane at time-travellers.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > Open source developers (including me) have said "we would like a
> > place to discuss open source tools within RIPE".
> > 
> > I have not heard any proprietary developers say the same. I don't
> > know why, but I guess because they already have plenty of venues to
> > connect with users and each other.
> 
> I believe this is a reasonable argument.
> 
> In this context I wondered what is so specific about the tools that
> makes it necessary to call out the nature of the distribution
> license. Jim summarized my question quite succinct: Isn't this a
> working group to discuss tools, exchange ideas, and approaches?
> 
> The question that I am trying to answer for myself is what is the
> primitive that you are trying to capture with the strong emphasis on
> Open Source. I think what you wrote above, and what I've seen in
> thread, contains part of the answer: there is a cooperative and
> bottom-up mindset with and between the developers and users of these
> tools, a different type of relation than the traditional proprietary
> vendor-custommer relation. 

The world is much more creative at making new problems than software
developers are of thinking of solutions to them in advance.

If you have closed source software, you know what to do - complain about
it on Facebook. ;) Seriously though, you engage with the vendor and
hope for the best.

What do you do if you have open source software that does not do what
you want? You have a lot of options:

* Talk to the developers, see if they want to do it
* Make the change yourself
* Pay someone else to make the changes

Say, for example, you want tcpdump to switch log files *on the hour*
instead of "every 3600 seconds". Even though it's not part of mainline
tcpdump, patches for this functionality exist, and if you prefer it's
not rocket science to make that change.

You have quite a few interactions that don't exist in the commercial
space - you have developer forums, user forums, the code repositories,
patch collections, distributors and their changes, and so on. Okay,
they exist for commercial products, but not in the same way. Everything
is ultimately couched in a client-vendor relationship.

What I'm thinking is that RIPE can offer a way for users with related
problems, using related software, to discuss this and add their voices
as a group to existing open source conversations. Ultimately for
smaller projects it might be the main way to engage the users.

> Oh, by the way, if we are going to exchange ideas about
> implementation, do we need an IPR policy?

Please no.

--
Shane