Simon Phipps is the president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Here, he is interviewed by Gordon Haff, a cloud evangelist at Red Hat. They discuss patent law, odf standard adoption in the UK and the importance of adopting open source in business. Key Highlights:
- Legal changes are occurring in the US that will make it harder for patent trolls to extract money from businesses without going to court.
- Google is likely to be the hardest hit of the tech companies by the UK government’s decision to use the odf standard for all collaborative documents. Microsoft’s support of odf is adequate today, while Google docs does not support most functionality.
We still need to keep on doing this education. It’s to a certain degree surprising that 15 years after the start of the open source movement, we’re still having to explain that it’s not about free stuff, that licenses matter, that a level playing field is key, and that contributing is in your own best interests. OSI is continuing to have those messages. – Simon Phipps
