During August, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum focused towards a number of issues related to the tension between traditional software development business models, FRAND and RAND IPR licensing requirements and the open source community. The event was structured such that two featured articles were posted by Talkstandards regular Stacy Baird (Managing Director of Citrus Co.) and James Bryce Clark (from OASIS). In response to these featured articles, a series of expert contributors were invited to post introductory remarks, upon which the event discussion took place. These articles are summarized below. Please follow the links to access the articles in full.

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There is a lot of discussion around how free and open source software (FOSS) can be used in a scalable business and what business models support using FOSS. This is often captured in questions about how one makes money when one gives the product away for free. Likewise there are concerns raised over how IPR rights in standards organizations need to be managed to enable FOSS implementations. A few definitions help tease apart the discussions so various paths through become apparent. For this discussion I’ll assume the actors are all well behaved, i.e. no plagiarists, submarines, or trolls.
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