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 Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated.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?

What is a derivative work of open source software? "The answer is I don't know -- and the fact is most people don't know," Jason Wacha, general counsel for MontaVista Software, said in a recent webinar. "The 'derivative works' definition hasn't been that well defined. There are 12 U.S. circuits, and each has its own definition -- some have none."

Business users of open source software should review their open-source licensing agreements, audit their use, and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code.

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.

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...

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 legal profession has established the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) to discuss topics including copyrights, licensing, software patents, open standards, case law and statutes in the open source arena. The IFOSSLR now appears in its second issue.

Business users of open source software should review their Open Source licensing agreements, audit their use of Open Source and create formal policies for managing source code, especially mixed-source code.

Software licensing in general, and open source licensing in particular, is poorly understood. I was reminded of this last week when speaking on a panel to a group of investors and entrepreneurs, the value of whose companies depends on protection of their intellectual property.