“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
| Jun ’09 | Jun |
| 12 | 13 |
The Italian Conference on Free Software, now at its third edition, will be held in Bologna on the 12-13 of June.
ConfSL 2009 - now a regular get-together for free software researchers, developers, and open source advocates - will cover economics, legal and technical issues, along with ethical, social and philosophical implications. Four different tracks will cover it all.
I am a member of the scientific committee, and I am really looking forward to the event.
See you there!
The Open Source Initiative board, after visiting the European Commission, has finally approved the European Union Public license on the 4th of March.
The EUPL 1.1 - the revisited version of the EUPL 1.0 including recommended modifications resulting from the OSI discussion - is supported by the EUPL community. Stakeholders can share opinions and pose questions through the EUPL forums and blog.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Licenses: EUPL got OSI Approval, but Still Doesn’t Show Up’
The NEXA Center for Internet and Society of the Politecnico di Torino - a multidisciplinary research center on the impact of the Internet on society, with a focus on technical, economical and juridical issues - on yesterday published a position paper on file sharing and extended collective licenses.
NEXA’s attempt to over turn the piracy debate with a solution that try to accommodate authors’ and users’ needs, following the example of Nordic European Countries.
Read the full paper (PDF, Italian), a result of NEXA’ Wednsdays.
Black Duck Software, the intellectual property management firm headquartered near Boston with offices in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong - announced the release of the Black Duck Suite, a unified framework bringing together three Black Duck products (Black Duck Code Center, Export and Protex).
Black Duck ’s survey conducted among software developers gathered at the SD West Conference held this week in Santa Clara (California), revealed little awareness about compliance, security and management problems. Actually those issues are addressed by Black Duck products and services, and I asked Tim Yeaton, one of the new CEO met at the open source think tank last week, to tell how he sees the market changing and how Black Duck strategy fits in the big picture.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Governance: Black Duck keeps Quacking, an interview with Tim Yeaton’
Whil reviewing books for the Jolt Awards, I have been reading the “Intellectual Property and Open Source” book, published by O’Reilly and authored by Van Lindberg. A book meant to be a developer’s documentation for the legal system, potentially able to serve different audiences, IT managers included.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Books: “Intellectual Property and Open Source”, by Van Lindberg’
HU: Government withdraws tender requesting proprietary software - Gijs Hillenius reported on the OSOR website the news that the Hungarian Central Board for Services withdrew a software tender violating Hungary’s regulations, as it is forbidden to refer to an actual brand (via glyn moody twitter).
Continue reading ‘EU Tenders Requiring Proprietary Software, Italian Regional Laws, EUPL 1.1: European links, 25-01-2009′
The Free Software Foundation on Monday announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License. The new version of the GNU FDL allows public wikis like Wikipedia to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license.
This new permission has been added at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project. The same terms are available to any public wiki that uses materials available under the new license. The Wikimedia Foundation will now initiate a process of community discussion and voting to determine whether or not to use CC-BY-SA 3.0 as the license for Wikipedia.
Lawrence Lessig positively comments the news:
TheFree Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0)license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here’s the FAQ for the amendment.
This is definitely an important change, I hope we will see more cooperation in the next future between the free software movement and the open source initiative.
Great move Richard!
OpenLogic just announced three webinars on best practices for open source governance.
How to Inventory Your Use of Open Source Software webinar will cover topics like how to use OSS Discovery software to take inventory and how to implement an ongoing audit of open source usage.
How to implement an Open Source Policy and Approval Process for Open Source Compliance webinar will disclose potential risks associated to open source usage, and how open source policies can help enterprises to manage open source licenses.
Understanding Open Source License Obligations in the Enterprise webinar will cover most common licenses’ obligations, and how to comply with them.
PAAL2008, Open and Free Public Administration, will be held this week on the 17th and 18th of April in Pula (Cagliari).
The second conference on FOSS in public administrations has a rich two days program, if you are in Sardinia this week and you have good command of Italian consider join the event.
For further information contact them.
Although there are dozens of open source licenses, the terms in copyleft licenses such as GPLv2 and GPLv3 seem to cause the most angst for enterprises using open source. Companies are concerned that they are putting their own IP at risk when using these licenses. In this webinar, you?ll gain a better understanding of copyleft licenses and how to manage the risks for your organization.
Topics covered in this webinar will include:
- An overview of copyleft — what it is and isn’t
- Managing potential risks to the organization
- Overview of potential lawsuits and recent cases
- Answers to common questions on copyleft licenses
Presenters in this webinar include:
Stormy Peters - Director of Community and Partner Programs for OpenLogic
Attorney Robert J Scott - Managing Partner of Scott & Scott
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