The best open source protection for “the cloud,” as Gordon Haff notes today, is the Affero GPL license. (Picture from our Tech Republic’s GeekEnd blog, written by Jay Garmon.)vv
Read more »Google’s open source problem is Affero
http://blogs.zdnet.com –
MySQL backtracks on closed-source plan
http://www.zdnetasia.com –
Sun Microsystems has backtracked on previous plans to release important backup features for its MySQL database under a proprietary license, following widespread criticism from the open source community.
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Selling a Proprietary GNU/Linux by Spitting in Its Pool of Life
http://boycottnovell.com –
The story of Novell is a rather complicated one because the company mocks the very same product which it tries to sell. Novell uses GNU/Linux FUD to market itself, especially by boasting Microsoft’s software patent ‘protection’ as its advantage, added value, distinguisher (the classic decoy being “interoperability”).
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Ubuntu launchpad for Affero?
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk –
The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive, has said AGPL is "a strong candidate" for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical's developer collaboration tool.
Read more »Microsoft Has a Reasonably Discriminatory Plan to Illegalise FOSS
http://boycottnovell.com –
A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft’s defense of RAND (and a bit of its latest slime against Groklaw). Do not be mistaken or deliberately misled to the point of believing that this RAND gotcha only applies to OOXML. It also applies to Mono and — by association — to Moonlight, which Microsoft hopes to infect the World Wide Web with.
Read more »Google's festering problem with the AGPL
http://www.cnet.com –
Google apparently likes open source that lets it "borrow" open-source software while giving comparatively little back, and always on Google's terms.
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RIAA to help enforcing the GPL
http://blog.milkingthegnu.org –
Free/Iliad is a French Internet provider with a whooping €1B in revenues. Its founder Xavier Niel boasts being a very profitable business with all salaries representing only a few percents of Free’s revenues: a performance that might be better explained by the amount of open source leveraged by their massive infrastructure.
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From "happy hacking" to "screw you" - the story of Meraki
http://www.virishi.net –
I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology.
Read more »GPL v3 Has Reached 2000 Projects!!!
http://gpl3.blogspot.com –
Our database now contains over 2000 projects that are using the GPL v3. This is a large milestone for the license, and seems to still be the beginning of wider adoption. Nine months have passed since the release of the controversial license and it has already gained 2k projects.
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The GNU GPL: Free as in Will?
http://blog.s11n.net –
As anyone who has anything to do with [non-Windows] software development knows, GNU’s definition of “free” is “free as in freedom and free as in beer.” But what dictionary did the GPL author(s) use when looking up a definition for “freedom”?
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OpenOffice.org goes to LGPLv3
http://blogs.sun.com –
You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants.
Read more »Microsoft Singularity: What is the mess we've been handed?
http://penguinpetes.com –
I'm totally tortured with agonizing over Microsoft's Singularity. See, I have a standing moral obligation with myself as follows: If Microsoft ever released a purely Open-Source or Free Software system - as defined by the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or common conventional wisdom - I have said (and will repeat here) that I would download it, try it out, review it, and possibly adopt it, to be treated no different from software from, for example, Red Hat Inc. or BSD.
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Category: Opposition Tags:
The impact of licensing choice
http://blogs.the451group.com –
Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:
Read more »Who told you that reading a license is boring?
http://planet.sabayonlinux.org –
In the last 24 hours I implemented Licenses validation, whitelisting, masking and database support to Entropy. When I started, I tried to find out if someone (maybe crazy like me?) had already made a list of free (as in freedom and/or beer) software licenses. I didn’t dig too much and decided to have a look at /usr/portage/licenses. OMG, 811 licenses to read!
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Barracuda turns to open source users for patent research
http://www.linuxworld.com –
Barracuda Networks CEO Dean Drako says his company won't license a virus scanning patent from Trend Micro, and he's going to users to help build Barracuda's case file of prior art—previous software products and documentation that could help invalidate the patent in court.
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