Open Source came before, if not provided a platform for, Software as a Service. Open Source Licenses have a big loophole for the most common method of software distribution today...

There are many ways to license open source software. Given the attention paid recently to the General Public License (GPL) and its latest version (GPLv3), you may be interested to know that there are other licenses that satisfy the principles of free and open source software without the confusion and polemics that surround the GPL.

How does License Proliferation effect medical software and what can we do about it? How to choose a license for your medical software project? What are the implications for the medical FOSS community of various software licenses? This is intended to be a complete guide to free and open source software licensing for medical software. Please comment on how I can make it better.

After nine months, an open secret can finally be acknowledged: The OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux, which was released by SGI in 1999, has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles this weekend. I stumbled upon one called “Do Open Source Licenses Have a Purpose?” which is to be honest a rhetorical question. Ken Hess on Daniweb actually suggests we should throw away our 64 different license CHOICES and just give away our code public domain.

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased.

Note: Free as in beer! Join MontaVista Software and distinguished open source licensing authority Jason Wacha for a review of issues surrounding open source licensing. Starting from base principles of differences between laws, licenses, and commercial agreements, Mr. Wacha will move on to issues surrounding the use of a General Public License (GPL) and how it affects Linux and other open source software.

“Open source” is a hot buzzword today. It’s important to understand free software is still subject to a license just like conventional shrinkwrapped packages. The big difference is these licenses convey rights which can’t be revoked. Here’s what they mean for programmers and for end users.