The big news for today is definitely open source licensing, with SugarCRM going GPLv3, the OSI approving SocialText’s Common Public Attribution License, BMC selecting the BSD license for its open source projects, and the newly re-named xTuple introducing yet another license.

The Open Source Initiative's chairman, Michael Tiemann, announced Friday that the organization's licensing board have officially approve the version three of the General Public License and Lesser General Public License as OSI-approved.

Setting the legal nuances of the chosen open source license aside, wouldn't two products under any open source license have the same claim to the open source moniker?

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.

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 Komodo Project from ActiveState to create Firefox-integrated web developer tools based on the award-winning Komodo IDE [...] The Open Komodo development environment will be entirely open source and licensed under the same terms as Firefox: Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL).

In my role as pseudo general counsel at Alfresco, I wade through a lot of contracts. As part of this, I'm constantly trying to find the right balance between the needs of our customers and partners in different geographies. Interestingly, our European and North American customers view licensing very, very differently. Generally speaking, our European customers want our software under an open-source license (GPLv2). North Americans? They want the benefits of open source without the obligations and perceived risk (meaning, they prefer a dual-license approach that allows them to contribute back modifications if they wish, but not out of duty).

What's the most popular open source license currently in use? If you said GPL you would be right. But how did you know?

When the reforged GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPLv3) was finalized and released to an expectant public on June 29, 2007, the most important decision may have been one postponed.