Moin Moin Zeitgeisters!

Today we have a little bit Open Source touched newsletter, but well you know, it is also a key driver in our technology future. FOSS is, meanwhile the foundation for innovation, adaption and creative solutions. Andre Staltz wrote about the Time Till Open Source Alternative (TTOSA) that shows backed by data that for every commercial solution, a FOSS alternative appears quite fast, and this gap between both releases is becoming smaller.

However, on our today’s menu:

• Open Source in Environmental Sustainability Report 2023

• License change in open source, how a single company shakes the market

• AI guidelines for journalists

• And in the treasure hunt: Supercloud, New York Times thinking about a lawsuit against OpenAI and the African cloud market isn’t growing strong due to high costs

Digital and sustainable transformation must converge as a digital public good

Open Source in Environmental Sustainability Report 2023

The team around Tobias Augspurger, Eirini Malliarki and Josh Hopkins have put together once again a truly comprehensive report. While you will need some time to get through the whole report, the tame gives some strong recommendations to build greater capacities and to support open source software in environmental sustainability.

Those recommendations focus on the following:

• strengthening the ecosystem by fostering knowledge exchange and interconnectivity

• bring relevant projects to underrepresented countries in the global south

• better incubation and support programs

• standardize environmental data exchange

Reading through this report will reveal you an immense amount of information and insights. Wherever possible, please leave some love and appreciation for Toboas and the team.

License change in open source, how a single company shakes the market

HashiCorp changes its open source license to a more business protective license

HashiCorp will change its license model for all key products for future releases. This excludes things such as the SDK or API, but any other company that incorporated some code e.g. Terraform or Vault, needs legal support right now. Practically Hashi can do whatever they want. But I think no one thought about the shake which will go through the market. Contributors question their contributions, other open source projects and commercial solutions need to check their options, and end users (also, they are theoretically not affected) stop projects or the change of IaC tooling due to these uncertainties.

It even didn’t take the weekend until a new “foundation” started forming, the OpenTF Foundation.

What I can observe is the directly started and very critical discussion on whether FOSS is the right thing or not, because someone can just change the license and everything else goes to history. But, look above, immediately a large group of people and companies come together, express they don’t like this way, and start going a new one. This is the power of the FOSS community.