--On Sunday, August 18, 2013 17:04 -0700 SM <sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net>
wrote:
I'd love to get more developers in general to participate -
whether they're open or closed source doesn't matter. But I
don't know how to do that, beyond what we do now. The email
lists are free and open. The physical meetings are remotely
accessible for free and open.
On reading the second paragraph of the above message I see
that you and I might have a common objective. You mentioned
that you don't know how to do that beyond what is done now. I
suggested a rate for people with an open source affiliation.
I did not define what open source means. I think that you
will be acting in good faith and that you will be able to
convince your employer that it will not make you look good if
you are listed in a category which is intended to lessen the
burden for open source developers who currently cannot attend
meetings or who attend meetings on a very limited budget.
I think this is bogus and takes us down an undesirable path.
First, I note that, in some organizations (including some large
ones), someone might be working on an open source project one
month and a proprietary one the next, or maybe both
concurrently. Would it be appropriate for such a person (or the
company's CFO) to claim the lower rate, thereby expecting those
who pay full rate to subsidize them? Or would their involvement
in any proprietary-source activity contaminate them morally and
require them to pay the full rate? Second, remember that "open
source" is actually a controversial term with some history of
source being made open and available, presumably for study, but
with very restrictive licensing rules associated with its
adaptation or use.
Does it count if the open source software is basically
irrelevant to the work of the IETF? Written in, e.g., HTML5?
Do reference implementations of IETF protocols count more (if
I'm going to be expected to subsidize someone else's attendance
at the IETF, I think they should).
Shouldn't we be tying this to the discussion about IPR
preference hierarchies s.t. FOSS software with no license
requirements get more points (and bigger discounts) than BSD or
GPL software, which get more points than FRAND, and so on?
Finally, there seems to be an assumption underlying all of this
that people associated with open source projects intrinsically
have more restrictive meeting or travel budgets and policies
than those working on proprietary efforts in clearly-for-profit
organizations (especially large one). As anyone who have lived
through a serious travel freeze or authorization escalation in a
large company knows too well, that doesn't reflect reality.
best,
john