Today's software market does not provide a level playing field upon which all software producers can compete fairly:
The "Sincere Choice" platform seeks to redress the inequity of today's software market through a set of principles that would allow both Free and proprietary software to compete fairly on their merits.
Sincere Choice was created as a response to a cynical Microsoft- dominated effort called "Software Choice", which speaks of fairness while actually acting to maintain the status quo. But Sincere Choice has turned out to be more than simply a response to Microsoft - it is the beginning of a viable political platform that would support Free Software without being unfair to proprietary software. A more complete platform would also include positions on software patents, digital rights management, trusted systems, computer crime, and other issues that could restrict Free Software use and development.
Bruce Perens will go over the problems in today's market, how the principles of Sincere Choice would redress them, and possible future directions.
For further information on the Sincere Choice platform see http://sincerechoice.org/
In the news:
An article about this talk at Tech Central Station.
About the speaker:
Bruce Perens is best known as the creator of the Open Source Definition, the canonical definition of Open Source software licensing and the manifesto of the Open Source movement. He is also founder or co-founder of the Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, the Open Source Initiative, and No-Code International.
His notable Free Software includes "Busybox", a toolkit for building tiny Linux systems that has become a standard in the embedded systems field. His "Electric Fence" is a memory allocation debugger that has saved programmers all over the world hundreds of thousands of hours, and has materially improved the reliability of software on Unix systems.
Perens is former project leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution, and contributed much to the development of Debian's software and policies. He recently left Hewlett Packard, where he had created the corporate Open Source policy manual and was a founding member of the company's Open Source Review Board.
Perens now provides those same services to other companies through his consulting company, Perens LLC.
Contact information:
Bruce Perens
Contact Info: http://perens.com/Data/Contact.html
Personal site: http://perens.com/
Resume: http://perens.com/Articles/Bio.html
510-526-1165
510-526-1165
bruce@perens.com