Category: Business

Of interest to business enterprises.

Posted on

Is open-source right for you?

I was asked recently to quote installing a 5-user open-source ERP system. Unfortunately, as with anything technical and complicated, “it depends”. Open-source software provides an incredible opportunity, but both client and vendor business models are still not familiar to most people outside the open-source community, who largely perceive open-source software as simply a less expensive alternative to traditional proprietary software.

Try asking yourself these questions:

  • Are you familiar with open-source software, its goals and philosophies, and licenses, business models, and support channels?
  • Is there a strategic benefit for using open-source software in your enterprise? Does using open-source software enhance your competitive position? Will you be “doing things” that are impossible otherwise, and will it be core to your business model?
  • Have you yourself installed the demo version, figured out the basics of how to use it, and have demonstrated it to anyone else?
  • Do you understand the technology involved? E.g. ERP, PLM, the internet, IoT, cloud hosting, change management, etc.
  • Do you understand the software development process? Change management? Agile? DevOps? Bug tracking? Workflow and data pipelines?
  • Is your finance person tech-savvy?
  • Do you have internal IT group, or do you already have a relationship with an IT services provider, or hosting provider?
  • Will you be configuring the software yourself?

You should have many more “yes” answers than “no” answers if open-source is right for you. More “no” than “yes” either means you have more boot-strapping to do, or you should buy a commercial product or service (which may possibly use open-source software behind the curtain).

To simply install open-source software on a server at a hosting provider generally costs practically nothing, typically at worst a couple hours for someone qualified. Add to that operating hosting costs, internal or external. The real costs are learning how to configure and use the software for your unique business, how to live with, work-around or develop the missing features (that you and least one other person insist are essential <wink>), customizing reports, etc.

As with any software, it’s important to uncover areas of friction as soon as possible. Finding out late that meeting a hard requirement will be extremely disruptive does no one any good. Prototype your basic business workflows and get quick validation by pretending you are various users performing their typical work tasks. However, it’s the confusing tasks, the ones “that depend”, or the ones that “we don’t need to deal with that now” that will likely determine in the end whether there’s a good fit or not, and also the implementation effort that will be needed. You may not need solutions for what you find, but you do need to know where you stand.

Fundamentally no one else can do this for you, because no one else understands your business like you do. The alternative is to have a proxy, which can turn the project into a 6-month to 18-month effort, with multiple people, requirements gathering, competitive product research, shortlist, deep-dive prototyping critical workflows with each shortlisted product, etc., which often is then beyond the ability of an SME to support.

 

Posted on

Open Source Software – Copyright, Trademark and License

I am an engineer, not a lawyer, and this post is not professional advice. Legal documents can be complicated and interpretation may depend on jurisdiction, context and domain. You should consult with a lawyer if the risks and consequences are important to you.

Open source software is a concept that enables software development and support to be shared by a typically non-competitive community. An open source project is more than just code, it is also a community motivated by common goals and bound together by the relationships formed by working collaboratively.

Open source projects use one or more forms of intellectual property (IP) rights protection to protect itself against being taken advantage of. These are copyright, trademark and license. Copyright protects ownership of the software source code, trademark protects the project name and image, and a license protects the project community from liability.

Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept that gives the author of an original work exclusive rights to their work. The copyright for a line of code is generally held by its author (developer), unless it is assigned to someone else. Assignment may be implicit, such as when an employee creates code for an employer (“works for hire”), or explicitly through a formal agreement, such as a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA).

Open source projects generally follow one of two options:

  1. Contributors retain individual copyright to their contribution. Author of have an inherent copyright to the code they write, but to limit liability, some projects require contributors to submit a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which states they have the legal right to provide their work to the project and any conditions they impose (e.g. the license).
  2. Contributors assign their copyright to a legal entity used by the project for that purpose, using either a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or a Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA).

Open source projects most commonly follow Option 1, in particular ad hoc projects. As a side-effect, it makes re-licensing almost impossible as it would require explicit consent from all copyright owners. Option 2 is most common when the project uses multiple licenses for different users (e.g. an open source license for some and a proprietary license and revenue opportunity for others), or if the project doesn’t want to preclude potential re-licensing in the future.

Trademark

Trademark law will provide practical protection of the project’s name, so long as the project uses the name in a way that can be trademarked, generally some type of logo. An individual (e.g. the project founder) or a legal organization owns the trademark (which preferably should be registered), and allows for its fair use by creating a Trademark and Logo Policy (e.g. the Drupal Trademark and Logo Policy).

A Trademark and Logo Policy clarifies rights over the use of the project’s identity. Your name and logo are important to your community, and may want to create T-shirts, booth displays at trade shows and conferences, support material for clients, etc., that incorporate the project name and logo. The Trademark and Logo Policy controls their use to the benefit of the project as a whole, and provides a background from which abusers can be legally instructed to stop.

License

Generally, the simpler the better but some projects use different licenses for different things, such as the GPL for code and a Creative Commons license for documentation.

Use a permissive license (e.g. the BSD, Apache or MIT license) if you want the software to be usable by as many people as possible. Use a copy-left license (e.g. GPL or AGPL) if you want to enforce users giving back. Commercial users may be wary of copy-left code in general, as it requires more thorough consideration to ensure the copy-left license won’t be applied to more code than intended once it is integrated.

Recommendations

1. Include a License and Copyright statement in the project source code (e.g. in a README file), and also state prominently on the project website. State the license for the code, and who owns the copyright. Describe any legal requirements for submissions, such as whether a CLA or CAA must be submitted first, and terms assumed to apply to submissions (such as the same license terms as the project). Explicitly say whether the license covers Plug-ins or other extensions.

The GPL is generally understood to apply to Plug-ins, but being explicit will avoid potential misunderstanding or disagreement, clarify the intent of the project and even encourage development (and save you from having to repeatedly answer the question).

2. Include a Trademark and Logo Policy statement in the project souce code (e.g. in a README file), and also state prominently on the project website. State who owns the trademark and/or logo, whether it is registered, and describe what is, and isn’t, considered fair use.

3. Publish a list of open source dependencies (the open source projects that your project depends on), including the license each uses. Make it easy for potential users to evaluate the implications. Ensure each included project identifies its own license in your repository. If needed, work with subordinate projects to help improve their legal clarity as it will benefit both of you.

Related Information

Bob Jacobsen had to regain control over the open source model railroad controller software he had written to clear his name professionally. See FLOSS Weekly Episode 117 and Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) in Wikipedia.

Roberto Rosario had to develop Mayan EDMS in a way that would permit GPL licensing when he was as an employee of the Porto Rico government, and also had to deal with an early fork that threatened the project’s future. See FLOSS Weekly Episode 253.

Posted on

Calgary Tech Groups

A colleague asked about tech groups in the Calgary Canada region.

The local ‘nix groups are CUUG (Calgary Unix Users Group, www.cuug.ab.ca) and Calgary LUG (Linux Users Group, http://clug.ca/). CUUG tends to focus more on server-side topics such as networking and security, whereas CLUG (at least from meeting topics and mailing list conversation) tends to focus more on distros, desktop apps and device interconnectivity.

CAMUG (Calgary Agile Method’s Users Group, www.calgaryagile.com). They cover a broad spectrum of software topics in their meetings and workshops, with a small-a-agile hook (e.g. developing software in an agile way using Git and GitHub, developing software in an agile way using Ruby…). CAMUG can draw 50-100 people for a popular topic, and their session last night on Appsec with Jim Bird was great!

The ASQ (American Society of Quality). The Calgary chapter (http://www.asqcalgary.org/ee/) seems mostly interested in manufacturing quality systems (i.e. enterprise stuff) and meets at night monthly in the NE. The topics have been hit and miss for my interests, but they’ve had excellent topics/speakers when I’ve attended.

The SQDG (Software Quality Discussion Group, http://www.sqdg.ca/) meets monthly downtown during lunch, and focuses on software testing practices. They’ve had some good topics, but I haven’t been to a session in over a year now. Again, the topics are hit and miss for my interests but the ones I’ve attended have been excellent with good networking opportunities.

Calgary Protospace (http://protospace.ca/) seem most interested in low-level hardware and firmware hacking, but the system drive failed in a NAS array a few years ago and all the family photos were temporarily unavailable (my wife said I lost them). A unix networking specialist I met through protospace helped me reconstruct the array and save my marriage.

Mobile Mondays (https://twitter.com/momoyyc) host a mobile-related hackathon the first Monday night of every month.

Startup Calgary (http://startupcalgary.ca/) is a government/industry coalition I like to follow not only for their own events, but also because they aggregate what everyone else is doing into a nice regular email they send me.

Calgary democamp (http://democampcalgary.com/) organize DemoCamps periodically for tech entrepreneurs to demo shiny new apps that will change the world <wink>. I’ve only been to one, but it was a packed house and very interesting set of presentations.

There are also a number of Calgary-area tech MeetUp groups, such as the Calgary WordPress MeetUp Group, the Calgary PHP AND NOT PHP Meetup Group, Pixels and Pints, PyYYC (Python) and more. Do some poking around for your interests, and contribute to the success of a community.

Posted on

ToDoList vs TaskCoach

If you’re looking for free task management software, I’ve got a couple suggestions. If you’re managing tasks for a group of people and don’t mind Windows-only software, take a look at ToDoList. If you’re managing tasks for yourself only but need something cross-platform, then take a look at TaskCoach.

Task management is a level down from project management. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Microsoft Project, but there are actually more than a few enterprise-type applications available that would rival SAP in complexity. I needed a tool for my team that was less about calculating critical paths, resource loading, and slack time, and more about keeping track of the teams’ s multiple conflicting priorities so I could step in and lend guidance towards a bigger picture when necessary.

First, I tried FreeMind for several months. I liked the “everything draws from something else” nature of mind-mapping, and the team liked the graphical view of our collective tasks and how they related. On the downside though, it was hard to review tasks in a linear fashion in a meeting, so next I tried the Windows-only ToDoList.

I’ve been using ToDoList for almost two years now. It has a clean user interface, tasks are easily assigned, categorized and sorted, it supports hierarchical tasks (or sub-projects), and has a good selection of built-in filters and attributes.

However, recently I’ve started alternating between Windows and Unix laptops for Achievo development, and needed a cross-platform task manager (I should also say I’m currently the only developer working on this new Achievo functionality). After some research, I settled on TaskCoach for Achievo tasks. The user interface works well, and it’s similar enough to ToDoList that I didn’t need a neural reboot when switching between the two. So far so good for another month or two.

But then one day I found myself asking “Why exactly am I using two different task management tools?”. ToDoList and TaskCoach seemed relatively interchangeable, ToDoList has CSV export while TaskCoach has CSV import, and so I started on migrating my ToDoList tasks to TaskCoach without giving it a further thought. First came a minor irritation that ToDoList wouldn’t export the ‘Assigned-To’ for a task, but then I thought “No problem, I’ll just assign them later manually”, but then after another hour found it didn’t matter – because TaskCoach doesn’t support assigning tasks!

Note to self: Never dive in without giving something a further thought – especially when you’re absolutely sure you don’t need to!