What Is Needed: Cathedral or Bazaar?

Recently Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) changed its business terms, telling its customers that they did not want to do business if their customers buy a few RHEL licenses, then use "clones" on their other systems, and tries to limit the distribution of Red Hat released binaries and source code to those systems licensed. Is this fair? Does it break the GPL? Out of this several of Red Hat's competitors have formed an alliance called OpenELA to create alternatives for RHEL customers. Much has been written on many sides about this situation, and it is still unfolding. maddog has had many different jobs since he started programming in 1969. In this talk he will outline how copyright, patents, trademarks and licensing came to the point it is now. He will show the difference between "Permissive" and "Restrictive" Open Source licenses and which are better for customers. In the end he will discuss a possible way forward to create a better Free Software community, even at the Enterprise level. Sobre Jon "maddog" Hall: Jon "maddog" Hall is currently the Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute (lpi.org), Co-founder and Senior Adviser to Caninos Loucos (caninosloucos.org), the President of Project Cauã and the Executive Director of Linux International. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969 (over a half-century ago), Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, educator, author, CEO and consultant. Mr. Hall has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, IBM, SGI, Futura Networks (Campus Party) and Linaro as well as being a private consultant for other companies. Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994 (over a quarter century ago), when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software. Mr. Hall served, and continues to serve, as the Executive Director of Linux International. Mr. Hall has taught full time at Hartford State Technical College (where he was Department Head of Data Processing from 1977 to 1980) and part-time at Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. Mr. Hall still likes talking to students over pizza and beer (the pizza can be optional). Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies". He currently writes a monthly article for Linux Pro Magazine and occasionally blogs for them on their web site. Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia, Canada, Vietnam and Brazil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware and Free Culture (Creative Commons). Mr. Hall has served and serves on the boards of several companies, universities and several nonprofit organizations. Mr. Hall is currently very active with the University of Sao Paulo's Centro Interdisciplinar Em Tecnologias Interativas (CITI), acting as a member of their advisory board. Mr. Hall is also the Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute, the world's premier Open Source Certification organization, and is the senior advisor and co-founder of Caninos Loucos, bringing inexpensive, locally designed and manufactured single board computers to Brazil. Mr. Hall is also the President of Project Caua. Mr. Hall has traveled the world (over 100 countries) speaking on the benefits of Free and Open Source Software, and received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University (1973), and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York (1977).