I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.
Stuart Cohen
(Credit: Collaborative Software Initiative)To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI's founding:
Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?
Cohen: I'm really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.
We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a "network effect" for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.
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The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:
By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very specific project requirements. AGPLv3 was written as a roadmap to foster the most open, transparent and collaborative open source and free software communities possible.
"Open" is in the eyes of the beholder--there is a longstanding debate between the GPL and BSD/Apache communities as to which is more open--but there's little debate that GPL offers a more robust way to provide incentives against forking a project. TriSano will be better for having all participants rowing in the same direction. AGPLv3 gives them this.
One question, though: why AGPLv3 instead of simply GPLv3? Is there an element of Web-based distribution here against which CSI is hoping to guard?
I reported earlier on the Collaborative Software Initiative's important work with the State of Utah on an infectious disease surveillance system. This week CSI and the State of Utah announced that the system has been open sourced as the Trisano Project:
TriSano is an open source, citizen-focused infectious disease surveillance system that allows local, state and federal entities to collaborate for the good of public health. With TriSano, the Collaborative Software Initiative provides a forum in which subject matter experts (i.e., doctors, nurses and epidemiologists) and software developers work together to facilitate the cre-ation of citizen-centric public health applications. This innovation ensures application features meet the specific requirements of each jurisdiction, allowing public health employees to achieve the goal of protecting lives.
The system itself is useful, but open source makes it broadly applicable and outside the control of any particular government or vendor. It's awesome to see CSI turn open source into something much bigger than just code and licensing. Great work!
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