Sunday, June 14, 2009

FreedomHEC 2009 in Taiwan

It was a wonderful day in Taiwan since FreedomHEC 2009 did a great job! Many famous people including jserv, CIH, authors of Linux Device Drivers, etc. came together to share their inside thoughts about the latest open source development, the Linux kernel as well as the GPL-license issues.

This seminar ended with a remarkable panel discussion where what's wrong with the managers' head towards OSS licenses was questioned. Let me quote the viewpoints from my previous manager as references:

The most important thing for us small companies is how to survive today rather than to carefully clarify the license issues. We never take OSS licence issues into consideration until we become large companies such as Linksys one day at length.

Sad! But I think it is generally true that the number of license issues, especially GPL-violations, caused by millions of small companies over and over again is far more than those so-called large companies while what the the gpl-violations.org can focuses on are only those companies with names known by people.

Finally, I raised a question which aroused completely different opinions among the leading kernel developers:

Android is Hot in recent years. What are your opinions about the modifications on the Android platform by Google? Can it be viewed as a progress for a compromise between open sources and commercial markets?

For most people, the answer may depends on whether or not the Android platform will achieve great success. Just wait and see.

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