Licensing

When Louis XV sneered disdain for the fate of France after his reign ("Apres moi, le deluge"), he uttered a sentiment that finds absolutely no purchase within the open-source community. Whatever its problems, the open-source world cares passionately about its principles, processes, and prospects. Insouciance is in short supply within the open-source community.

For this reason, we're at a critical moment in the history of open source, the moment when we can firmly declare, "Open source has won."

No, it has not "won" in the sense that all software is released under an … Read more

Open source has proved to be phenomenally successful, and continues to grow. As open source grows beyond its roots in software infrastructure like operating systems and Web servers, however, it is finding that the types of community it attracts is increasingly corporate.

Even in the geeky application server layer, Marc Fleury notes that JBoss' "community meant users, partners, consultants," not the freedom-loving developers we often associate with open source. This is because our simplistic conception of community has likely always been wrong, as Michael Dehaan suggests.

Open source has long been more about users than developers for the … Read more

Please see the response from Wolfram|Alpha at the bottom of this post.

One thing has become clear: to succeed on the Web and in the next generation of software, you need to invite, not dissuade, outside participation. Tim O'Reilly calls it an "architecture of participation," but whatever you call it, the best software strategies are those that encourage outside contributions, rather than discourage it.

This makes Wolfram Alpha's terms of service mind-boggingly backward at best, and troubling at worst. Some have pointed to the quasi-search engine's sometimes weird results as a reason to give … Read more

As open source has gone mainstream, it has become clear that "open source" is a much bigger tent than Richard Stallman, founder of the free-software movement, or the Open Source Initiative, maintainers of the Open Source Definition, envisioned.

Open source is being applied to a wide array of industries--from software to automotive--and it has started to assume different forms to fit the very different needs of insurgents and incumbents, customers and vendors, nonprofits and for-profits, at different phases of development.

One way to view the continuum of disparate needs, and the licensing strategies that adhere to them, … Read more

Tim O'Reilly has been stating for years that open source qua licensing is dead, and that the real debate/interest has moved to open source's attributes of open, community-based collaboration. Despite Tim's consistent message, it has only been recently that it has started to sink in for me, with an "ah-ha" moment hitting me halfway through a podcast recording with Geva Perry and James Urquhart on the interplay between open source and cloud computing.

Some of us are just slow, I guess.

Over the past few years, the open-source community, in all its different colors … Read more

The European Commission has a bold plan for improving software quality: make software developers liable for their code. The purported reason? Consumer peace of mind, according to the European Union commissioner of consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva:

If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed. That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. [The] internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can … Read more

Microsoft for years has been warning the world not to use open-source software. Apparently, its Kumo search team didn't get the memo.

As The Register reports, Microsoft's new Kumo search technology is filled with open source and, in fact, the Kumo search team, formerly Powerset, "tr(ies) to use open-source software, if it is available."

In other words, open-source software appears to be the default choice for the Kumo team, not proprietary software. It looks like Microsoft's anti-open-source bubble really has burst.

Indeed, reading through the Powerset-turned-Microsoft-Kumo team's description of its approach reads like … Read more

I have spent years advocating the GNU General Public License as the optimal open-source license for commercial open source.

Roughly nine years after I first became a fan of the GPL, I think I've been wrong.

My admiration for the GPL mostly stemmed from its ability to mimic, but then invert, proprietary licensing. The GPL is like opening a cannister of radioactive waste: while your competitors can touch it, you're dead certain that they won't.

Given that openness is increasingly a winning business model--if not the winning business model, as Red Hat executive Michael Tiemann argues--one … Read more

Apple has benefited heavily from open-source software over the years, and it has earned a warm spot in the hearts of open-source advocates, despite its heavily proprietary stance.

With BluWiki, however, Apple appears to have gone too far.

In November 2008, as CNET's Tom Krazit wrote on Monday, Apple wrote to the BluWiki administrators to have iPodHash, an open-source program that attempts to enable iPods and iPhones to sync with music software other than Apple's iTunes, removed from the Web site. Apple argues that iPodHash violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by actively seeking to circumvent Apple's … Read more