"In high-technology markets, disruptive innovation is something to be taken as a given, like gravity. Businesspeople do their best to exploit it, avoid it or cope with it. Industry upstarts depend on it, while established companies fear it. But no one in the competitive world of high technology thinks they can stop disruptive innovation, any more than they can alter the laws of gravity. But what if you could? What if an industry could banish disruptive innovation, leaving only a "well-mannered marketplace" of incremental innovations that reinforced comfortable business models?

You sometimes hear people trying to dismiss the GNU General Public License, the most popular of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, as being unenforceable. While there is a long list of companies that have been alleged to infringe the license, none of these companies seem to agree this license is unenforceable and opt to settle out of court rather than challenge the license.

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.

Open Source is still a disruptive idea. It has moved beyond that in server operating systems, of course, with Linux on 20% of servers shipped these days. That’s known as being “mainstream.” But the effects of open source development and business models continue to be heavily disruptive as they spread into new technology markets. Disruption often benefits consumers directly.

"The Free Software Foundation has published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software..."

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.

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Monday, November 19, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all?

In the old "pre 2000" day, the objective of most technology companies when they applied for patent protection was to ensure that their products and technologies were not copied by their competitors. The idea was that thanks to the patents you enjoyed about 20 years of exclusive use of your technology, after which everyone was free to use it because by then it was considered obvious.