In the cloud, of the cloud, and for the cloud
Yesterday Matt Asay of the OSI visited Bungee Labs. We invited Matt to provide us advice specifically on the issue of the licensing options we're planning to use when we open things up for wider beta program and beyond. It was a fascinating discussion - we all agreed that today's current licensing options we have available to us are, as he put it, not yet '21st Century-ready'.
Given the food for thought, Matt shared his thoughts here yesterday. I absolutely agree with Matt that the cloud-based future we're heading to will cause an invigorating and necessary debate within the industry on the topic of licenses in a purely networked computing environment:
"I believe we're on the cusp of a hugely disruptive change in the way open source software is licensed. The OSI, of which I'm part, is against license proliferation. But the community and OSI will need to figure out how to make open source relevant to the online world, without stifling the creativity that has built it. This is a non-trivial problem, and it is a problem."