licenses

First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn't want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don't have widespread use and acceptance.

This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public License.

Google's Chris DiBona played the proliferation card again against the MPL, but also admitted that how Google determines whether a license is suitably popular is "so arbitrary." Great. That makes me feel better. At least there's a … Read more

One of the reasons I attend O'Reilly's Open Source Conference (OSCON) is that, more so than others I go to, it gets into the intellectual and--dare I say--philosophical underpinnings of things as well as the things themselves.

To be sure, this sort of thing may not be especially important if we're talking about things like servers--although these too interact with long-term undercurrents such as massively multi-core programming  that are largely removed from day-to-day concerns but which are immensely important in the long view. In the case of Open Source, however much it has blended into the … Read more

I asked Forrester Research lead analyst Duncan Jones for his thoughts on the just-announced Select Plus licensing program offered up by Microsoft.

Jones said that the program is largely an improvement on Microsoft's Select program, but also pointed out a few potential pitfalls to watch out for.

On the plus side, Jones said that Select Plus should help large organizations that have multiple, autonomous business units.

"Often there is no central person or process to coordinate a group-wide forecast, agree (on) joint strategies and negotiate a single Select agreement because each unit wants to make its own decision … Read more

Microsoft said Monday that it is adding a new licensing option, this one dubbed Select Plus and targeted largely at midsize firms.

The program's two main attractions are the fact that it is not tied to a specific term and it makes it easier for different subsidiaries of a company to take advantage of their combined purchasing power.

The additional option runs counter to the trend at Microsoft, which has been working to scale back the number of different licensing plans. The company had managed to shrink its number of options--from 107 programs in 2006 to 23 as of … Read more

Software licensing drove a healthy increase in revenue for Oracle during its fourth quarter.

For the quarter, which ended May 31, the enterprise software giant reported revenue of $7.24 billion, up 24 percent from the same period a year earlier. During that three-month period, revenue from new software licenses rose 27 percent to $3.14 billion, and revenue from software license updates and product support rose 25 percent to $2.83 billion.

Revenue from services also was on the increase, though not by quite as much. It was up 18 percent, to $1.26 billion.

Oracle said that its … Read more

It comes as no surprise that a healthy percentage of Apple consumers buy the products for the way they look. But for those of you less interested in the sleek white boxes and black rectangles, and more interested in the software, then perhaps the Psystar Open Computer is the way to go.

The Psystar computer (which looks like a pretty generic tower) comes installed with Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and functions exactly how you'd expect an Apple to function, but for hundreds of dollars less. In Monday's Daily Debrief, my first question for CNET News.com … Read more

Reddit launched itself as an open source project today and chose the occasionally controversial CPAL license for the release.

There doesn't appear to be a goal of monetization as much as there is a goal of ubiquity through proliferation. If that were reversed there is no question that the GPL is a better choice.

I happen to think CPAL is exactly the right choice and here's why:

1. It's one of only 3 OSS licenses that take the "network" into account (CPAL, OSL, AGPL) whereby usage can be considered distribution. 2. It doesn't require … Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court handed a big victory to Quanta Computer on Monday when it held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion barred LG Electronics' claims against it.

In doing so, the Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's previous decision that patent exhaustion did not apply to method claims and extended that doctrine to licenses for products that "substantially embod[y] a patent." This case is likely to substantially change the playing field for patentees seeking to monetize their patents in a vertical industry value chain.… Read more

Six technology titans are banding together to jointly license patents that cover WiMax in an effort to prevent costly royalty rates that might deter adoption of the wireless technology, according to a report Sunday on the Wall Street Journal 's Web site.

Cisco Systems, Intel Corp., Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Alcatel-Lucent, and Clearwire, plan Monday to announce the creation of the organization--to be called the Open Patent Alliance--the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the groups plans.

WiMax is a wireless broadband standard that has been touted as a breakthrough for cheap high-speed Internet access. Its backers claim that WiMax can … Read more