Viewing profile — ShaneCurcuru

Open Collective (really Open Finance Consortium Inc.) is a US 501(c)(6) nonprofit that runs a payments and accounting platform, providing fund acceptance and budget services to a t…

Personally I know it since I've been volunteering there since 1999 and know how elections work and know most of the membership. But that probably doesn't help much if you don't kno…

Apparently marketing people who want to sell stuff under those new licenses think "source available" is uncool. Some folks are working on terminology over here, if you're curious. …

SSPL is definitely not open source, it violates #6: https://opensource.org/definition-annotated#6 That's the point of open source, and free software in a way as well. Copyleft lice…

If you simply believe "CLAs are bad", you're missing the point (unless you refuse all legal documents on principle, or something). The question is: WHO are you signing the CLA over…

As noted elsethread, there are several 501(c)(3)s that pay for software development, either via having their employees/contractors do it (directly or indirectly), or by providing g…

Naming things is hard, as software engineers know. It's only OCF that's shutting down, not OC, or OCE, or OSC, or even OCNZ (I just found out about that one today). In any case, th…

I have a general explainer about the OCF shutdown (not the OC, or OSC, or OSE, or OSNV!) over here, where I include more links to software foundations that might also act as fiscal…

The OCF shutdown will not affect the OC, OSC, OCE, OCNZ, or Social Change Nest UK operations, so this is only about the 600 collectives at the US public charity OCF. If those acron…

Important clarifications: - The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. …

Just to address the last sentence: the Apache Software Foundation would never adopt Commons Clause. It's antithetical to the ASF's entire licensing strategy, which is to give stuff…

You have to have a license to attract contributors. https://choosealicense.com/ and github make it easy; there's zero excuse to not have a license. Permissive licenses attract the …

I've been blogging on the facts, with sources wherever possible: https://communityovercode.com/2017/11/legal-issues-software-... And previous posts on the basics and a timeline. It…

Still developing story, but this shows reason #67 why trademarks are more important than most devs think. Another interesting discussion is on LWN: lwn.net/Articles/738046/

Just a general comment about the whole thread: trademark law is far more complicated and particular than you know (unless you're an IP lawyer; then you might appreciate it). Not on…

USPTO Trademark Pro Tip: search links are session specific. Use the blue TSDR button's link instead: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86930821&caseType=SERIAL_...

Indeed, Hormel once sent nastygrams about their trademark to the ASF over our Apache SpamAssassin software. Trademark owners can ask everyone to use or not use their own names. Act…

Good question. Under something like GPL or Apache, npm (or anyone, really) would have a clear legal reason to continue using and redistributing the code; there's nothing the copyri…

Trademarks: even more understood to modern programmers than C++ multiple inheritance. Trademark owners - especially registered ones - can ask you to treat their mark any way they l…