Grid Meter » Open Source Pioneer Shifts Focus

April 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Pioneer Shifts Focus

TAGS: None

With the final version of GPLv3 in sight, Eben Moglen, a leader of the Free Software Foundation and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center has indicated that he will be leaving the former to concentrate more on the latter. That, and teaching at Columbia.

Moglen is an excellent speaker and gives a great interview. I don't think I've ever heard someone who has such a complete grasp of such a complex subject as the legal and licensing aspects of free software and making sure it stays that way. His enthusiasm for that subject is contagious and he has a way of making others understand public software licensing as though it was common sense. I envy his students at Columbia Law School.

Some of the more complex issues with grid computing are the social ones and the legal ones. The latter generally focused on licensing issues in a complex distributed environment where there is no traditional usage model of software. I featured Moglen in an interview with the Globus Consortium Journal nearly two years ago where he touched on aspects of open source licensing and how it relates to grid.

The technical aspects of building a grid are complex, but surmountable. The complexities of grid software licensing hasn't necessarily been given the same level of attention and may, quite frankly, be a foundation for the social barriers as well. Someone like Eben Moglen who understands the technology, has a unique talent for crafting licensing solutions for complex use cases, and has a gift for making people understand things in a straight forward way may just be what grid needs.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on April 26, 2007 08:09 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: