license

So you want to comply with the GPL...

For years people have suggested that open-source adoption would go even faster if only open-source licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) were easier to understand. My personal belief is that "It's so hard to understand!" tends to be an euphemism for "I really want to pilfer this open-source software but its terms don't let me!" After all, the terms of the GPL have been explained repeatedly, including by the Free Software Foundation itself, which authored the GPL.

Regardless, the Software Freedom Law Center is now making it easy to understand the GPL and related licenses … Read more

Facebook developers to factor in age, location

Facebook has announced modifications to its developer application programming interface so that the creators of third-party applications can restrict their reach by demographic--more specifically, by age or location.

The update is designed to help developers who may run into legal issues if they make their applications available to all Facebook users, regardless of how old they are or what countries they live in.

This could apply, for example, to promotional applications created by liquor companies that need to restrict access to those over 21 in the United States, or to game makers that have only been licensed in certain countries. … Read more

Dual licenses and open source: Best of both worlds?

Most enterprises needn't worry about the "viral" aspect of open-source licenses. Because most enterprises use software for internal purposes, rather than distribute it, they don't trigger the standard open-source requirement to contribute back derivative works. A recent Federal Computer Week article by John Moore does an admirable job of clarifying this.

There are, however, instances in which an enterprise might well trigger the contribution requirement of open-source licensing. If a company sold off a division to another company, complete with the servers running modified open-source software, this would likely trigger a "distribution" and might … Read more

Microsoft relaxes virtual-machine rules

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a change in its licensing policy to make it easier for businesses that want the ability to shift server software that is running in a virtual machine from one physical machine to another.

The licensing shift, which had been expected, lifts a cap that had limited the ability to switch software from one physical machine to another within a server farm. Under the prior rules, such shifts could me made only once every 90 days. That's a problem because software from VMware and others aims to allow such transfers to be made dynamically in response … Read more

Microsoft to tweak virtualization licensing policies

In its continuing effort to adjust to the realities of virtualization, Microsoft plans on Tuesday to announce new licensing and support policies to address how software can be used across multiple virtual and physical machines.

The software maker confirmed the planned move to CNET News, but declined to go into details ahead of the Tuesday announcement. However, Network World speculated that the company may ease up on a licensing requirement that ties software in a virtual machine to running on a particular server.

That poses a challenge in a world in which virtualization software, such as that from VMware, allows … Read more

VMware: Don't shut down that virtual machine

Update at 8:35 a.m. PT on Wednesday: Since ZDNet UK published this article, a patch for the flaw has been posted to VMware's Web site.

VMware virtual machines on all hosts with the company's latest hypervisor, ESX 3.5 Update 2, in enterprise configurations have found that it will not power on after being turned off.

The hypervisor refuses to start when the date is August 12, with customers around the world discovering the problem as midnight was passed in their time zones. A flaw in the VMware licensing code is responsible, according to Martin Niemar, … Read more

VMware and the GPL: Round two

The "Is VMware violating the GPL" question is circulating again (Matt Asay follows up his own post here) so I thought it would be useful to dust off an Illuminata Perspectives that I wrote when this same thing cropped up about a year ago. I've excerpted the most salient points from the original post and added a little updated commentary.

Background:

The basic issue is as follows. As most folks involved with servers know by now, VMware ESX Server is a server virtualization product that allows multiple "guest" operating systems to co-exist on a single … Read more

Transmeta licenses low-power tech to Nvidia

Update at 10:40 a.m. with background about why Nvidia licensed Transmeta's technology

Transmeta has licensed its LongRun and low-power chip technologies to graphics chip giant Nvidia for a one-time fee of $25 million. Nvidia is hoping tackle power consumption issues that dog its high-performance chips.

Transmeta, an erstwhile chip vendor turned intellectual property supplier, said Nvidia was granted a nonexclusive license to Transmeta's Long Run and LongRun2 technologies "and other intellectual property for use in connection with Nvidia products."

The agreement grants to Nvidia a license to all of Transmeta's patents and patent … Read more

The OSI digs into license proliferation again...but why?

Someone needs to tell the Open Source Initiative, Google, and others who fret about license proliferation that the market has already cut down the number of actively used licenses to just a small handful: L/GPL, BSD/Apache, MPL, and a few others (EPL, CPL). Even so, the OSI has decided to kickstart its stalled movement to reduce the number of open-source licenses condoned by the OSI.

As OSI board member Russ Nelson writes in the board minutes:

Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers - an upper tier … Read more