At the heart of many open source debates is the issue of licensing. Is one license better than the other?

"In the fall of 2005, in my home state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn, the CIO of the Commonwealth, endorsed a plan to require the state government to use the Open Document Format for storing government records."

"Microsoft has begun to talk about open source again. Sure, atheists sometimes do talk about God."

"In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth."

Nokia researcher Jamey Hicks recently proposed a Open Source Hardware License (OSHL) for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Is there a need for a hardware-specific license? If so, what makes hardware different from software?

"PJ of Groklaw believes Microsoft is (as usual) up to no good by pushing two licenses for OSI approval. I don't trust Microsoft any more than she does, but I don't share her seeming paranoia that every move the company makes is a deviously cunning ploy to destroy its enemies."

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.

This was the body of an email message sent to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-discuss email list less than two hours after the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was officially announced by the Free Software Foundation (FSF): "I submit the following licenses for consideration by the OSI for inclusion in the list of licenses complying with the OSD."