Dan Bentley shared on Twitter the flow chart “Which open source license?“, graffle by Brian Fitzpatrick. Next time someone will ask you for an advice on open source licenses just point them to this! 
Archive for the 'Licenses' Category
Fabrizio Capobianco - Funambol CEO and AGPL’s prophet and forerunner - with his recent blog entry pointed me to Chris Di Bona’s article about Google’s decision to tolerate the AGPL, and I took the chance to make a writeup about how Google and Microsoft differ in their open source software hosting facilities.
Continue reading ‘Google and Microsoft Open Source Project Hosting Policies’
The Binary Analysis Tool - created by Loohuis Consulting and Opendawn, sponsored by the NLnet foundation and supported by the Linux Foundation - automates some compliance engineering tasks using a method designed to find license violations in embedded devices.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Due-Diligence: BinaryAnalysis’
The Italian Constitutional Court recently ruled that the preference for open source software is legal, while taking out two articles from the original regional Piedmont law, actually found to interfere with the Italian copyright law and the Italian constitution.
Italian free software activists welcomed the court’s decision, others put a different interpretation. I am not a lawyer nor a constitutionalist, and I didn’t make my mind yet on this, but I took the chance to have a look at what happens around the world.
How open source licensing’s decisions are taken depend on legal issues, business strategies and costs structure.
IP lawyers as well as specialized firms are probably happy to help with the first ones, but let’s talk about the implications in the area of Value Configuration and Key activities looking at some real cases (Day Software, MySQL).
Continue reading ‘Open Source Licensing, Value Configuration and Key Activities’
Over the last weeks Alfresco, Sonatype and WaveMaker made their own decisions about licensing.
Alfresco went LGPL, Sonatype - a company with a strong Apache background - for the very first time decided to release some code under GPL, while WaveMaker dumping the AGPL in favor of Apache.
Let’s have a closer look at how - and if - these changes reflect new business directions.
The second issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review - a collaborative legal publication aimed at increasing knowledge and understanding among lawyers about open source - has just been released.
Continue reading ‘International Free and Open Source Software Law Review: the New Issue is Out!’
The BlackDuck Legal Webinar series on the 17th of November at 11:30 am ET will run the Lessons from the Real World. The webinar will cover the main issues an organization face when wants to be in controls on open source. Zenoss and Extreme networks will bring their own experiences in this respect.
On the 16th of April the Korea Software Copyright Committee (SOCOP) - a non-profit organization under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism having the mandate to promote the protection of software-related intellectual property rights - will host the Free Open Source License Insight Conference, at the COEX Intercontinental Hotel (Seoul).
The conference will start with invited talks by experts from abroad and South Korea, a panel discussion will follow. Being and invited speaker I want to thank Ms. Cho Jung-Hyun from SOCOP for her kind invitation, I am really sorry I can’t go.
Continue reading ‘Free Open Source License Insight Conference, 16 April 2009, Seoul’
Don’t worry about Red Hat’s 2009 profit decline - Savio Rodrigues keeps analyzing Red Hat’s profits, and highlighting that one-third of Red Hat’s profit comes from activities outside of its core business.
Microsoft releases ASP.NET MVC under the MS-PL License - Miguel de Icaza replying to comments explains why MS-PL incompatibility with GPL code is not an issue within C# and ASP.NET code.
Maintenance Woes Handicap Microsoft’s Azure - Billy Marshall’s, CEO of rPath, essay on cloud actors. Read also Javier Soltero’s thoughts.
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