Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 20 September 2006 05:46
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
Despite having a relatively small population, Australia has a relatively large number of developers of free and open source software in prominent positions; apart from Towns, there is Andrew Morton, who holds a senior position in the Linux kernel project. Asked for possible reasons why this was so, Towns cited the prosperity, education levels, the well-known "tyranny of distance" and the lack of a really strong entrepreneurial software streak, among others.
Additionally, "we have a kick-ass developers conference that attracts the best Linux and free software developers in the world, along with a small enough populatio that it's pretty easy for anyone who's interested to go along and learn more."
Towns agreed with the concerns about leadership which developer Matthew Garrett had expressed about the Debian project when announcing his resignation; referring to the functioning anarchy that Debian often resembles, Garrett had said that "having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases."
"I was disappointed when he resigned. He's still a part of the community though, both through his involvement in some Debian discussion channels and lists, and his work on Ubuntu and other free software, so he hasn't entirely left," he said. "I hope he'll entirely return eventually though."
Towns prefers not to think about the release of the third version of the General Public License, slated for March 2007. "I'm pretty happy with the GPL v2 and BSD licenses, so I mostly just don't think about it."
A compromise that helps everyone to move to GPL v3 would be best, he feels. "I hope the FSF (Free Software Foundation) will be able to find a way of meeting the needs of various big companies that have developed their own free licences, so that they can standardise on the GPL v3. Without that standardisation, we have artificial barriers to re-using code amongst open source projects, which doesn't really help anyone; the differences between Sun's CDDL (Common Development and Distribution Liecnse) and the GPL make it difficult to share work between Linux and OpenSolaris, and are one of the major issues in the recent forking of cdrkit, for example," he said.
