licensed

The RHEL/Fedora licensing model: Not just for grown-ups

Marc Fleury says something that doesn't ring true for me in his analysis of which license - GPL or BSD - to use for a new startup. Marc gives a great answer, born of hard experience, and one that is definitely worth reading. (Teaser: Use GPL if you want protection of your code and BSD if you want to be free lunch for everyone else to achieve ubiquity.)

I have one quibble, though. Marc suggests that the RHEL/Fedora model is only for established companies:

...[T]he ultimate license scheme for OSS is still RHEL/Fedora: a proprietary distribution of OSS software. It doesn't matter if the software inside is GPL/BSD or whatever. Realistically speaking however, RHEL/FEDORA is not an option for young projects, this is only viable for established products and may snuff your growth in the early stages.

Much depends on what Marc means by "established products," because my own experience with the model is directly contrary to Marc's statement.… Read more

Qtrax: No music yet

Correction: I originally posted that Qtrax uses MusicIP. According to a PR representative from that company, Qtrax has no deal with MusicIP--the companies have talked, but no deal has been signed. Apologies for not double-checking all my facts.

I was finally able to get the Qtrax 0.2 beta client, and it's clearly based on Songbird.

Songbird defies easy summarization: it's an open-source project, based on the Mozilla platform, that intends to ease the creation of digital media apps. The basic app is a straightforward music library organizer and player (some of Songbird's founders worked on Winamp), … Read more

Linux to GPLv3: A practical matter not a legal one

A couple weeks ago, the Linux Foundation released a podcast interview with Linus Torvalds that, among other topics, touched on if or when Linux would "upgrade" from the GPLv2 license to the new GPLv3 version that was approved last year after much acrimony. Allison Randal's summary over at O'Reilly Radar seems about right: "In the end, what we have is a stable system by reason of inertia. It may eventually shift, but not anytime soon."

One major reason is that Linus just doesn't see any compelling reason to make the shift--which is to … Read more

Differences between European and U.S. adoption of open source

In my role as pseudo general counsel at Alfresco, I wade through a lot of contracts. As part of this, I'm constantly trying to find the right balance between the needs of our customers and partners in different geographies.

Interestingly, our European and North American customers view licensing very, very differently. Generally speaking, our European customers want our software under an open-source license (GPLv2). North Americans? They want the benefits of open source without the obligations and perceived risk (meaning, they prefer a dual-license approach that allows them to contribute back modifications if they wish, but not out of duty).

I've been trying to figure out why the two geographies, surrounded only by the Atlantic Ocean, have such different perspectives on licensing. I believe it comes down to this: governments versus private corporations.… Read more

Problematic GPL enforcement at Verizon

I think that Alfresco's Matt Asay and I share some of the same concerns about the current spate of lawsuits that BusyBox and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) have been busily filing. On the one hand, open-source developers have to protect their rights. However, as Matt notes:

My primary concern is that this (and the other two ongoing BusyBox lawsuits) will create more misunderstanding about the requirements the GPL imposes. It won't be helpful to have this result in less GPL-licensed software being adopted.

Put another way: if using GPL software comes to be seen as an … Read more

More Commercial Creative Commons conundrums

A few days back, I posted about the difficulty of distinguishing commercial from noncommercial usage with respect to the Creative Commons license.

There's an ongoing legal case that concerns another aspect of Creative Commons commerciality. As Josh Wolf describes the original story:

On April 21, 2007, during a church camp, Chang's counselor snapped a photo of her and uploaded it to his Flickr account. He published the photo under a CC-BY-2.0 license, which allows for commercial use of the photo without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

In less than two months, the photo had been cropped … Read more

Does the Noncommercial Creative Commons license make sense?

Back when I was writing software for PCs, it was pretty common to see licenses offering some program free "for noncommercial use" or some similar wording. The basic idea was that if you got people using some application at home, maybe they'd want to use it at work too--and then they'd buy a commercial license. Besides, very few of those home users were about to send you a check anyway. It's a little bit like using an open-source business model to build volume and awareness with free, unsupported software and then make money from support contracts when a company wants to put the software into production.

There's a difference though.

No widely used open-source software license that I know of makes a distinction about how the software is going to be used. Rather, open-source licenses concern themselves with essentially technical details about how code is combined with other code and what the resulting obligations are with respect to making code changes and enhancements available to the community. But none of the major open-source software licenses restrict use to schools or personal PCs or anything like that.… Read more

Antipiracy effort targets little guy

The Business Software Alliance is best known for tracking piracy rates and announcing high-profile settlements over improperly licensed programs. But a new study finds that most of its money is not coming from big corporations, but from small businesses.

Associated Press writer Brian Bergstein said his analysis showed that 90 percent of settlement revenue comes from small businesses. Last year the agency, which monitors compliance for companies such as Microsoft and Adobe Systems, took in $13 million in settlement proceeds, according to the AP.

Among the other interesting tidbits is a chart showing where the organization's income originates (81 … Read more

Affero: A new GPL for software as a service

The Affero General Public License, a new variation of the seminal General Public License (GPL) specifically for one situation the regular GPL doesn't address, is now final.

The Affero GPL contains a provision specifically for situations when software it governs is accessible as a service over a network. Where the GPL treats that situation as a private use of software, permitting the user to keep any changes private, the Affero GPL lets programmers include a requirement that users of the software must be able to download it when it's offered as a network service.

The Free Software Foundation, … Read more