Philippe AMELINE

Paris, France

Open source project leader (in health)

Hi Martin,

Basically, this is a story of a group that must part for, probably, many painful reasons.

I can guess that if happened when a non profit organiation was to be established, the suddain need for such an organization is probably already the symptom of a rampant problem.

Since your article has been written in order to make a case for open source, I would like to tell you that my feeling is that this problem may not occur because of the "standard open source contracts" for developers, but rather because of the lack of contract to reward the "invention process".

In the venture capital domain, the inventor knows that succes will involve his dilution as a shareholder, but a major growth of his capital.
In the open source world, I have seen inventors been diluted by a sudden increase of the developpers community, and just gaining an increase in workload. This leads to major disappointment, and, if unable to cope with this, open source would be in danger because inventors would no longer exist.

You say : "What I do know is that we now have an interesting situation where two development teams are pursuing quite different philosophies on the furtherance of basically the same product - a situation that could not easily happen in the commercial world.". But doesn't it look like the way IBM lately tried to regain it's inventor rights when releasing the PS/2 model, and Compaq led the competitors group.
I see the same bad initial conditions: an unprepared success leading to a disappointing not rewarded dilution for the concept originator.

Maybe, in your case, should the non profit organization been created at the very begining, maybe with rules that can permit the inventor to be granted.
May this contract be unfair, then no developpers community would lead to no succes.

Just a guess.