Open Web Foundation is to Autonomo.us as OSI is to FSF?

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint).

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.
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Miro, Kaltura, and the Generative Future of Internet Video

Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube’s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause - both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.
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Represent

I’ve been catching up with videos since the release of the Miro player public preview. (And as I’ve had some traveling time, on trains, waiting for planes, etc).

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.
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Microsoft and the Future Imprecise

[Update: 8/11/07]
Well it turns out to be not so indefinite as I thought.

Yesterday while I was in New York these emails arrived at license-discuss - submitting the Ms-PL and the Ms-CL:

Subject: For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License
From: “Jon Rosenberg (PBM)”
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:05 -0700
Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:05 -0700

Microsoft is pleased to submit the Microsoft Permissive License to the OSI for consideration as an OSI approved license. Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and permissive terms combined with intellectual property protection.

The three sections below provide the information required for the discussion portion of the approval process. We look forward to working with the OSI on this submission process and discussing this submission with the open source community.

Jon Rosenberg
Director, Source Program
Microsoft Corporation

[Full text]

and

Subject: For Approval: Microsoft Community License
From: “Jon Rosenberg (PBM)”
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:42 -0700
Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:16:42 -0700

Microsoft is pleased to submit the Microsoft Community License to the OSI for consideration as an OSI approved license. Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and clearly delineated reciprocal terms.

The three sections below provide the information required for the discussion portion of the approval process. We look forward to working with the OSI on this submission process and discussing this submission with the open source community.

Jon Rosenberg
Director, Source Program
Microsoft Corporation

[Full text]

This means it was really only about two weeks delay - not at all unusual in a company Microsoft’s size.

I assume the Ms-RL will not be submitted as it would clearly fail - it basically enables viewing of source code only.

As much as everyone is wary of Microsoft’s entry here, I think it is great to see these licenses submitted and reviewed.
[/Update]

[Original: 8/8/07]

One of the announcements at OSCON was from Microsoft, who announced that they would be submitting some licenses to the OSI for approval. (See the story on EWeek, InfoWorld, and InternetNews).

This has lead to some spirited debates and questions about just what it would mean for any Microsoft license (I have yet to see confirmation from Microsoft on which licenses will be submitted) to be OSI approved, including:

• Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Radar: Microsoft to Submit Shared Source Licenses to OSI (also with a good vibrant comment thread
• Glyn Moody at Linux Journal: Why Microsoft is Going Open Source
• Matt Asay at C-Net: Microsoft’s motives in seeking open-source blessing

My questions are much more basic:

1. When, exactly, will Microsoft submit licenses to the OSI for approval?
2. Which licenses will they submit? (Ms-PL, Ms-CL, and/or Ms-RL)

I went back and listed to Bill Hilf’s keynote again - he refers to the over 500 projects released under shared source licenses, and the question he has long gotten about why those projects weren’t released under OSI approved licenses.

He then announces that:

today we are, today we - we are submitting them right now -we’re working with the OSI right now to get them into the approval process, it’s an important step for us

What does that mean? Getting “them into the approval process” would seem to involve following the approval process as clearly spelled out on the OSI site - but I haven’t seen anything on license-discuss yet . . .

More on Moglen v. O’Reilly

Last week, during the O’Reilly Executive Briefing at OSCON, I blogged about the Moglen O’Reilly interview - “Eben Moglen - Putting the F back in FOSS.”

Although the video hasn’t yet surfaced, some interesting commentaries have.

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