Keynote at Black Duck Korea Open Source Conference

I've been giving a keynote at the Black Duck Korea Open Source Conference yesterday, and I'd like to share some thoughts about it.

In terms of the content, I spoke about the fact that the ultimate goal/wish/intent of free software projects is to receive contributions and for all of the individual and organizational users to join the collaborative development process. However, that's just the intent, and it's not legally required.

Due to GPL enforcement work, a lot of attention has been created over the past ten years in the corporate legal departments on how to comply with FOSS license terms, particularly copyleft-style licenses like GPLv2 and GPLv3. However,

License compliance ensures the absolute bare legal minimum on engaging with the Free Software community. While that is legally sufficient, the community actually wants to have all developers join the collaborative development process, where the resources for development are contributed and shared among all developers.

So I think if we had more contribution and a more fair distribution of the work in developing and maintaining the related software, we would not have to worry so much about legal enforcement of licenses.

However, in the absence of companies being good open source citizens, pulling out the legal baton is all we can do to at least require them to share their modifications at the time they ship their products. That code might not be mergeable, or it might be outdated, so it's value might be less than we would hope for, but it is a beginning.

Now some people might be critical of me speaking at a Black Duck Korea event, where Black Duck is a company selling (expensive!) licenses to proprietary tools for license compliance. Thereby, speaking at such an event might be seen as an endorsement of Black Duck and/or proprietary software in general.

Honestly, I don't think so. If you've ever seen a Black Duck Korea event, then you will notice there is no marketing or sales booth, and that there is no sales pitch on the conference agenda. Rather, you have speakers with hands-on experience in license compliance either from a community point of view, or from a corporate point of view, i.e. how companies are managing license compliance processes internally.

Thus, the event is not a sales show for proprietary software, but an event that brings together various people genuinely interested in license compliance matters. The organizers very clearly understand that they have to keep that kind of separation. So it's actually more like a community event, sponsored by a commercial entity - and that in turn is true for most technology conferences.

So I have no ethical problems with speaking at their event. People who know me, know that I don't like proprietary software at all for ethical reasons, and avoid it personally as far as possible. I certainly don't promote Black Ducks products. I promote license compliance.

Let's look at it like this: If companies building products based on Free Software think they need software tools to help them with license compliance, and they don't want to develop such tools together in a collaborative Free Software project themselves, then that's their decision to take. To state using words of Rosa Luxemburg:

Freedom is always the freedom of those who think different

I may not like that others want to use proprietary software, but if they think it's good for them, it's their decision to take.