Licensing

Microsoft's 'Custom XML' patent suit could put ODF at risk

The infamous U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has slapped Microsoft with a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to CNET. This likely won't stop Microsoft Office from shipping, as CNET's Ina Fried writes, but the bigger question may be whether the lawsuit will reach beyond Redmond to also threaten the Open Document Format (ODF).The lawsuit doesn't affect all of Microsoft Office, … Read more

Apache makes its first $420 million

Others and I have made much of VMware's acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million, but one crucial point has been overlooked: this is the first big acquisition of a company that depends on the Apache license.

Yes, we've seen smaller acquisitions of open-source companies that rely on Apache-style licensing. IBM acquired Gluecode (Geronimo project), SpringSource bought Covalent (Tomcat), Oracle acquired Sleepycat (Sleepycat, BSD license), and there have likely been others that I'm simply not remembering.

But the big, head-turning deals? GNU General Public License (GPL). Every one of them.

Nearly every other big open-source acquisition, from JBoss ($… Read more

Is Google's open-source advocacy a patent-busting scheme?

Open source means different things to different people. It can be a software development methodology, a distribution technique, or a marketing gimmick. Could it also be a way to minimize patent infringement damages?

Brian Prentice, a research vice president with Gartner's Emerging Trends and Technologies Group, speculates that it just might be. Google has been actively developing open-source alternatives to leading proprietary products, like Google Wave to compete with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. As Prentice indicates, Google has also been publicly advocating passage of the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which might have a lot to do with its … Read more

GPLv3 hits 50 percent adoption

In July 2007, version 3 of the GNU General Public License barely accounted for 164 projects. A year later, the number had climbed past 2,000 total projects. Today, as announced by Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona, the number of open-source projects licensed under GPLv3 is at least 56,000.

And that's just counting the projects hosted at Google Code.

In a hallway conversation with DiBona at OSCON, he told me roughly half of all projects on Google Code use the GPL and, of those, roughly half have moved to GPLv3, or 25 percent of all Google … Read more

When freedom isn't free (software)

At the Oscon conference this week, Tim O'Reilly repeated something he has been arguing for years, but that resonated powerfully given some of the rancorous debates currently raging in the free and open-source software community. O'Reilly cut through the misguided logic of free-software advocacy with a simple statement:

I don't care about free software. I care about freedom...Architecture of systems matters more than licenses.

An open-source software license doesn't necessarily make you open. An open-source license doesn't guarantee freedom, either--at least not in the broad sense of the word.

For example, O'Reilly indicated … Read more

Has Canonical licensed away its business model?

By announcing that it has open-sourced its Launchpad project under the Affero GPL version 3, a year after rumors swirled that it would, has Canonical licensed away one of its best revenue opportunities?

Roughly two years ago, I walked up London's High Road from Seven Sisters Tube Station with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Mark and I talked about a range of things, but one of the things that particularly caught my attention was Launchpad, a collaboration and hosting platform for open-source projects that makes it easy to track code, ideas, and other … Read more

Microsoft embraces GPL, opens Hyper-V to Linux with LinuxIC

Old dogs may struggle with new tricks, but they seem to be able to figure out new licenses.

In a shocking move, Microsoft announced Monday the release of Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC).

The news reflects Microsoft's continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.

But the truly startling news is that LinuxIC is being released under the GNU General Public License (version 2). Microsoft once called GPL anti-American. … Read more

Open-source legal education comes to OSCON

If you're an open-source developer, OSCON is the closest you'll come to Mecca, whatever your religious persuasion. But OSCON has been branching out in the past few years, and this year, for the first time, it includes a a one-day, free seminar focusing on significant legal issues, called "Understanding Legal Issues in Open Source."

Given the revived interest in open-source licensing and the impact it can have on one's project or business, this strikes me as a "must attend" event.

The seminar isn't part of the official OSCON proceedings, but is free … Read more

Open by default, but subject to interpretation

Red Hat marketing guru Chris Grams posits a simple but powerful key to Red Hat's strategy: default to open. It's not new to Red Hat--Tim O'Reilly's analogue is the "architecture of participation"--but it has apparently influenced everything from product design to office layouts at Red Hat.

In a nutshell, it means:

...[R]ather than starting from a point where you choose what to share, you start from a point where you chose what not to share.

You begin sharing by default.

It's a good principle for any company, open or not. It'… Read more