LAST year the term "InnerSource" made a temporary comeback, whereupon we looked at who's looking to gain/profit from it (and kept promoting it). "The organization may still develop proprietary software, but internally opens up its development. The term was coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2000," Wikipedia says. But behind the latest incarnation exist curious actors. It's related very closely to openwashing -- another subject we covered extensively last year.

Oh! Reilly... ORLY?

"Around the same thing I took note of who had become President. It's listed in this press release."There's this thing called InnerSource Commons. Their opening statement says: "The InnerSource Commons (ISC) is a growing community of practitioners with the goal of creating and sharing knowledge about InnerSource: the use of open source best practices for software development within the confines of an organization. Founded in 2015, the InnerSource Commons is now supporting and connecting over seventy companies, academic institutions, and government agencies."

Some months ago they established themselves, as per this press release, as something akin to Linux Foundation. It is a corporate front group.

Around the same thing I took note of who had become President. It's listed in this press release. It's a person who used to work directly for Bill Gates and who crafted a licence whose goal was to be deliberately incompatible with GPL/copyleft. Have things changed? Not quite. "She also runs DaneseWorks, an open source consultancy whose clients have included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation," it says here. So even after working directly for Gates she still worked for him at some capacity. You know where the salaries come from. Here she is speaking on behalf of "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" 4 years earlier.

"If their true motivations are purely corporate, why are they exempted from tax?"So from a career of anti-GPL she moved on to work for Bill Gates. Now President of The InnerSource Commons (ISC).

Any further investigation into their motivation would likely be spurious. These people aren't friends of Free software but foes of it.

Mind the fact that similar issues have surfaced at the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft employees (salaried 100% by Microsoft) are now bossing Linus Torvalds and speaking officially for the Foundation. We saw an example of this as recently as days ago. We left a couple of links in Daily Links.

The InnerSource Commons (ISC) is nothing more than a think tank for proprietary software companies, even if it calls itself a charity. It's an insult to legitimate charities and it may cause the IRS to grow ever more suspicious of such "open" groups. If their true motivations are purely corporate, why are they exempted from tax? Just like the Gates Foundation, this seems like a tax dodge. The apple doesn't fall and roll far from the tree... ⬆

"There's free software and then there’s open source... there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

--Bill Gates, April 2008