There was recently a good suggestion on Slashdot about how to fix license complexity: Object oriented licencing? (Score:4, Funny) by IPFreely (47576) <mark@mwiley.org> on Friday August 24, @06:36PM (#20349001) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 17, @10:12AM) So what we really need is a smaller set of base licenses that include object oriented features like [...]
Read More »The open source community is a pretty open and pretty tight knit community. Not only do most people know most the other people, but there's a lot of open and public information about people from their own blogs to LinkedIn to Facebook to lots of media coverage. So when I read this quote in the [...]
Read More »LinuxWorld has an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds, Q&A: Torvalds on Linux, Microsoft, software's future. I recommend reading it. Linus comes across as a no-nonsense, I'm-not-going-to-get-involved-in-all-that-FUD, just-let-me-write-interesting-code, type guy: "First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses [...]
Read More »"Copying open source is not a violation of copyright." That's what I got out of the JMRI lawsuit, i.e. Jacobsen vs Katzer, i.e. the model railroad story. Here's what I understand: There was this model railroad guy who wrote some open source software, JMRI, licensed under the Artistic License. (A bunch of other people also [...]
Read More »We've helped a lot of people create an open source policy. The most common question is, can you share a real, live policy with us? The answer is no, I can't share anyone else's policy with you (nobody wants to share them for some reason) but I can share what I know about them and [...]
Read More »Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail) has a really thought provoking post Can Open Source be giving comfort to the enemy? He talks about how he works on unmanned drones in a very open source fashion and that his work is being used around the world, including Iran. Right now, as far as he [...]
Read More »The Peer-to-Patent project launched two months ago to very little fan fare – at least very little fan fare for such a big step. So what is the Peer-to-Patent project? The New York Law School launched the Peer-to-Patent project as a year long trial project endorsed by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Peer-to-Patent lets [...]
Read More »The GPLv3 is quickly moving in. If you remember, we polled the OpenLogic Expert Community back in April and they said that the GPLv3 would move in quickly: 71% would be in favor of some or all of these projects moving to GPLv3 77% thought that it would take a year or less for their [...]
Read More »I'm not sure how I feel about MySQL not providing public access to the source code for their enterprise edition – that's why I haven't blogged about it yet. (They don't legally have to provide the source code to everyone – just the people they provide binaries to. They also insist that the enterprise [...]
Read More »Here are some of the misunderstandings around open source software that I hear every day. Feel free to add your own! The most important thing is whether you modify the code or not. I keep hearing from people, "we're ok because we didn't modify it." Or they create a policy that doesn't allow anyone to [...]
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