Community-based support is not the same as commercial support.  Community-based support is a purely volunteer effort, and should not have particular expectations of response times.  For example, telling the community that a particular issue is “Urgent!” does not generally make it more urgent for the community.  Making no effort to solve the problem yourself generally leads to even less urgency from the community.  If you want a commercial level of support, pay for it.  For example, Canonical offers commercial support for Ubuntu.  There are many support vendors out there.

Open Source is not Public Domain software.  It has a copyright and a license.  I have seen several people complaining that particular libraries are GPL-licensed (or other so-called “viral” licenses) preventing them from using them in their commercial applications.  Please realize that you are asking to take someone else’s work for free and turn a profit on it.  Either participate in the social contract of open source, find another library, or approach the developer and offer to pay for a dual-license to allow use in your proprietary work.  Using GPL code without adhering to the copyleft provisions of the license is software piracy, which nobody should tolerate.  Presumably, if you don’t want your application to be open source, you’re looking for others to pay you for your work.  I don’t think you’d very much appreciate it being resold without a license and without revenue for you.

There is a social contract in addition to the legally-binding licenses behind FOSS.  Respecting it will continue to encourage the development of a productive software ecosystem.

“The Art of Community” tackles a very difficult question in the Open Source world: how do you build a strong community around your project?  Jono addresses this by using anecdotal evidence of good community organization, and discussing the facets that apply to community development.  Jono’s varied experiences are shown through anecdotes about the Ubuntu community and other communities he has participated in.  The stories he shares are concise and clear, but demonstrate their points effectively and thoughtfully.  Jono’s writing skills are first-rate, with strong points made clearly.  He builds the community idea from grassroots to the enterprise and shows how community participation can help — and harm — at each step along the way.  It’s obvious that Jono knows what he’s talking about, and he communicates it well.  I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the dynamics of a community or any project leader looking to build from the ground up.

Free IT Athens is a group of like-minded citizens who realize that computers are a necessary component of everyday life. We believe that everyone deserves access to low-cost computer equipment and computer-related services. Our goal is to provide access to information technology resources to Athens-Clarke County residents and organizations. We also aim to create well informed advocates in free software and open information technology.

I’m interested in helping/starting a similar organization here in the Atlanta area.  I know there are a lot of deserving individuals and community organizations, and it provides a great opportunity to showcase the strengths of open source software.  Unfortunately, there is no way I can get this off the ground myself.  I’m looking for some more individuals who might be interested in a meeting (either in-person or via IRC/dim dim/etc.) to discuss the feasibility and planning for such a group.  This (hopefully) serves as my “feeler” for others who might be interested in participating in/organizing such a group.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote:

Mozilla Corp asked that this be added in order for us to continue to call the browser Firefox. Since Firefox is their trademark, which we intend to respect, we have the choice of working with Mozilla to meet their requirements, or switching to an unbranded browser. [...]

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Mozilla to have requirements and guidelines for the use of their trademark [...] That said, I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary, but they do, and none of us are in a position to be experts about the legal constraints which Mozilla feels apply to them.[...]

Please feel free to make constructive suggestions as to how we can meet Mozilla’s requirements while improving the user experience. It’s not constructive to say “WTF?”, nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla’s rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile.

I have to completely agree with this.  The reaction of the community is, in some cases, completely irrational.  People ‘threaten’ to fork Ubuntu if this EULA is displayed; people state they have to use another distribution because Ubuntu is not listening, etc., etc.  What people somehow don’t get is that it’s NOT Ubuntu’s choice: they can either ship FF with the EULA popup or remove all branding and ship it under another name (ala Iceweasel), which would probably be a slight burden to Ubuntu adoption.  (People migrating from Windows would have no idea what Iceweasel is.) I do think it’s somewhat shortsighted of Mozilla to feel that an EULA is necessary to call the browser ‘Firefox’, but that’s the route they’ve chosen.  If you don’t like the EULA, you can choose to install the ‘abrowser’ package or another browser.

Unfortunately for me, I don’t see a lot of choice but to use Firefox or abrowser: I regularly use a half-dozen extensions (Ubiquity, NoScript, Ad Block Plus, Web Developer Toolbar, UnMHT, etc.), and I don’t know of any other browser with that sort of flexibility.  Midori, the alternative browser in Gnome in Intrepid, seems to have a seriously hard time rendering some pages, and I haven’t even thought about trying Flash in it.

It also makes me begin to think about alternative e-mail clients.  Can anyone recommend a client that supports GPG signing/encryption, multiple address books, and can import from Thunderbird?  It would also need to support something similar to Thunderbird’s identities, as I use multiple e-mail addresses associated with a single account (as well as multiple accounts).

I’m a complete fan of open source, but I also realize that Mozilla has to protect its brand.  Mozilla is a business that has funded a great deal of Open Source Development, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the partnership with Google and other aspects of the Firefox brand.  Software companies have to generate a stream of revenue somehow, and I think the people who are using the Launchpad bug as a forum are missing that.