Badgeware and Open Source

A few months ago I stumbled across this well-written article on ZDNet that discusses whether "badgeware" should be considered "Open Source". For those of you that may not know... the "official" definition of Open Source is maintainted by some self-appointed organization, known as OSI. You can view their definition, in its entirety, here. OSI is responsible for defining "open source" AND adding their stamp of approval for the many licenses that are floating about nowadays. To my knowledge they refuse to add any "badgeware" licenses to their approved list - even though most of these licenses are simply derivatives of the Mozilla Public License.

The term "badgeware", generally means that a licensee must leave in-place certain image/text hyperlinks that normally point to the author's website. So yes, you have access to all the source code, but are not allowed to remove these images that identify the original authors. Is that "open source"? To me, it is. To the OSI, it isn't.

Why does badgeware exist?

Simply put - It stops the Larrys of the world from taking your code, branding it with their big fat "O", making a mint off of it, and never paying you a nickle. Its another method that open source companies have found to create cash from "free" (or "monetizing" - stupid word).

A lot of these badgeware companies own all of their product's IP. In other words, they own the rights to the code. This is an important distinction from the opensource companies/projects of before, because when you own all of your IP, you are able to change licenses whenever it pleases you. For example, if Apple wanted to rebrand OpenSourceProductX, its authors could change the license to something Apple would think is appropriate, in exchange for $. So badgeware has two positive effects, 1. Free branding, and 2. Cash.

In fairness, I will also mention that another avenue for a badgeware company turning their products in to cash is that the "badge" serves as a nag of sorts. The MuleSource CEO is pretty clear about his motives in this posting, regarding that:

So, if you use Mule in your software product and sell it
commercially, then you are required to either make a licensing deal with us or keep the "powered by Mule" logo visible.

SugarCRM is probably the best known example of this. If you were to download their open source CRM application, you would find their SugarCRM logo at the bottom of every page, and are bound by the license terms to not remove it. Sorry, Larry, you can't take Sugar and rebrand it Oracle.

Is badgeware open source?

I know... why there's a stink over this is actually quite silly, but there has always been an overabundance of sillyness and religious fighting in the opensource world, so its par for the course. Why OSI won't approve of these new licenses, I could not gather from the article. After reading the OSI's definition of "open source", I could not find any bullet-point that forbids "badgeware".

Working for JBoss, I've had to listen to the pinheads at BEA launch public crybaby fits over "JBoss is not as open source as BEA, as open source as IBM, as open source as Apache, as open source as your mom". From them, I expect the ridiculous and incoherent ramblings of a lunatic... from the OSI I would simply expect a coherent and reasonable bulletpoint in their definition of open source.

Badgeware is certainly not going away, and my fear is that if the OSI chooses to ignore it, or worse, refuses to approve the licenses, they will find themselves as irrelevant as the UN in short time.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo