Osmocom project vs. sysmocom GmbH

Hi all! As some of you already know, Holger and I have recently started a new company called "sysmocom - systems for mobile communications GmbH". The process of establishing the new company has now formally concluded. Before some rumours start to spread, we would like to clarify some points and make sure there is mutual understanding between the Osmocom community and the sysmocom company. sysmocom is intended to provide commercial offerings related to the Osmocom projects. This is not entirely new. Especially on the network side, people like Holger and I have been doing quite a lot of paid development to bring those projects forward. We would not have many of the features we have today, if it wasn't for customers who actually pay us for development of OpenBSC, OsmoBSC, OsmoSGSN and the various side projects more targetted at a real network operator like cellmgr-ng, bsc-nat, gb_proxy - just to name a few. However, this has always only been freelancing development of Software. With sysmocom, we want to go one step further and work on hardware products related to the various Free Software projects. Right now I don't want to talk too much about unfinished products, but we are working towards an inexpensive BTS product, we are funding the prototypes for Osmocom SIMtrace, and we will likely also see stuff like OpenBSC appliances. Given our past involvement and exposure into other projects that share a split Free Software / business set-up, we think we understand very well where potential issues of conflict between the two sides may be. Let me make some more clarification what this is not about: * sysmocom is not about creating proprietary derivates of Osmocom software. We work on Free Software which is publicly available under OSI approved and FSF endorsed licenses. We may offer proprietary hardware and sometimes software - but those are independent projects from existing Osmocom software. * we specifically will not have a public and a non-public version of the same program with differences in features. * sysmocom is not a VC-funded startup. It's a very small company run out of personal funds with no intention to take external funding or grow rapidly. Nobody but Holger and I determine where it goes and what it does. * sysmocom does not hold any copyright on the Free Software projects. The copyrights stay distributed with the major authors such as Holger, Onwaves, Sylvain, Dieter, Andreas and myself. None of the others have any affiliation with sysmocom. I have (personally, unrelated to sysmocom) asked some of the smaller contributors for a copyright transfer to make sure we could do the AGPLv3 transition, or future re-licensing decisions without having to ask dozens and dozens of people. sysmocom does not seek to control the Free Software projects. * we will maintain a strict separation between the community side of things and the business side. Unlike some other popular projects, we will not end up in a situation where the osmocom.org websites will be full of advertisements and hidden links that lure you on the company website. * we will keep a strict separation of naming. Osmocom is for the FOSS projects, sysmocom for the business. The company will use the term "Osmocom" only in descriptive context, not as a product name, brand or for advertisement. If you do have any concerns, please feel free to share them. However, I'd like to avoid cross-posting them throguh different mailing lists. Please follow-up-to openbsc(a)lists.osmocom.org Regards, Harald -- - Harald Welte <hwelte(a)sysmocom.de> http://www.sysmocom.de/ ======================================================================= * sysmocom - systems for mobile communications GmbH * Schivelbeiner Str. 5 * 10439 Berlin, Germany * Sitz / Registered office: Berlin, HRB 134158 B * Geschaeftsfuehrer / Managing Directors: Holger Freyther, Harald Welte