Category Archives: Articles

Copyleft Confusion

‘Strong copyleft’, ‘weak copyleft’, and ‘permissive’ are all terms that can cause confusion when discussing open source licensing. Simon’s been using some different language to help work round the confusion and keep the different licensing options clear for his clients. In his current InfoWorld article he explores some of this terminology and explains why it’s better suited to the task.

To begin with, ‘reciprocal licensing’ is proposed as an alternative way of talking about ‘copyleft’. As clever as the phrase ‘copyleft’ is, the newly suggested terminology better enables the uninitiated to grasp the concept quickly and fully, as it acknowledges the use of ‘copyleft’ to express the community expectation of reciprocal behaviour by participants.

For more examples of clear language for talking about open source licensing, check out the full article.

Illegal Lock-In

Public ITC procurement tenders in Europe are subject to a number of laws and procedures designed to avoid discriminatory behaviour favouring specific vendors. A recent OpenForum Europe report shows that in spite of these laws, many tenders do name specific vendors. The naming of vendors in procurement tenders is indicative of vendor lock-in, especially where the same vendor crops up many times across different tenders.

Lock-in is a serious problem. As well as costing governments up to €30 Billion in unnecessary expenditure, the freedom to leave those locked in systems in favour of more open solutions is often ruled out by the high exit costs. Read more analysis of EU procurement lock-in and the OpenForum Europe report in Simon’s ComputerWorldUK article.

Neuroscience and the Vision of Computing’s Future

Whilst attending OSCON, Simon ran into and conducted a short interview with Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins has a number of different claims to fame. The Palm Pilot and the Treo particularly stick out in the memory and indeed it’s  for “the creation of the first commercially successful example of a hand-held computing device” that he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Yet despite originating what is now a massive market in hand held devices, his personal passion is to be found in neuroscience and it’s to that cause that his energy is now dedicated. Continue reading →

Is Ubuntu Edge Worth the Money?

UbuntuTo say that Canonical’s $32 million crowd funding effort on Indiegogo is ambitious is an understatement. If they reach their target it will blow previous crowd funding records out of the water and as it is they’ve already surpassed many of the sites previous funding records. The money is intended for the production of the “Ubuntu Edge”, an experimental phone running Ubuntu Linux as its operating system and with the capability of running as a full desktop computer when docked with an HDMI monitor.

The smashing of records like “fastest project to raise $1m” reveals something of the projects popular backing, but Canonical still have a long way to go before they reach the target they’ve set. Nay-sayers would have us turn away from the project, insisting that the money should come from more traditional sources, like the mobile carriers. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth explained in a short interview at OSCON last week, this view ignores one of Edge’s key guiding principles. The crowd funding of the project allows it to take big strides forward in innovation that conservative phone companies are currently unwilling to enter into due to the fact that the technologies are not yet proved to be popular. If the crowd funding succeeds, that in itself will be a massive validation of the technology and will help enable similar future technologies to break into the mobile market much sooner than they would have otherwise.

Ubuntu Edge is an exciting project, pushing the boundaries of technology and committed to putting open source software into the mainstream. Read Simon’s reasons for backing the project and more in this weeks InfoWorld article.

Download Services Best Practice

Some open source software has turned to software installers as a potential monetisation point. Famously Oracles Java, which attempts to install a toolbar with every download, but they’re not alone. Potentially, taking money for the promotion of other, proprietary software at the point of download could be an acceptable way to monetise projects. This will only be true though in cases which carefully follow some best practice guidelines. Continue reading →

GitHub, Black Duck, and the lower burden of OSS compliance

Earlier this week we saw the debut of GitHub’s new microsite choosealicense.com. At the same time, source code analysis specialist Black Duck revealed their analysis of GitHub projects. The analysis claims that 77% of GitHub projects have no declared license. A little digging needs to be done to properly understand this number though.  Continue reading →

GitHub and Open Source Licenses

As Simon wrote last November, although GitHub is self-described as the “world’s largest open source community,” a significant number of the projects hosted there come with no rights whatsoever for you to use their code in an open source project. That’s because so many don’t include an OSI-approved open source license.  It seems as though someone at GitHub agrees with the view he put forward; yesterday they made a number of moves to rectify the situation. Continue reading →

A Change in License for Berkeley DB

Perhaps you didn’t spot it, but last month in their new Berkeley DB release Oracle changed the license associated with the software. Many will see this as a betrayal of trust, despite the fact that the new license (the AGPL) is also strongly copyleft, published by the FSF and approved by the Open Source Initiative. Of course, Oracle are completely within their rights to change the license as they see fit, but for Web developers using Berkeley DB for local storage, the seemingly small change from one strong copyleft license to another may well be seen as cynical and manipulative.

Why would that be? Continue reading →

Does Open Source Really Need Tax Breaks?

Open source Foundations have a great track record for good governance of open source projects – think of the Apache Software Foundation, the Document Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation or the Mozilla Foundation and the tremendous software they produce speaks volumes. We take it for granted that they need to be tax-exempt organisations.

Yet troubles in the USA with gaining recognition for open source projects from the tax authorities raise an important question: is tax-exempt status really necessary? Or are we mistaking approval of sound accounting principles for certification of good governance?  Today’s article in InfoWorld has more.

 

The Power To Act Against The Community’s Interests

This week it emerged that somehow an error had found its way into the MySQL build system which had changed the licenses on the manual pages from GPL to a restrictive proprietary license. It took some two months before the issue was discovered. Oracle have reversed that change now, so the panic mode has passed. The incident definitely served as a timely reminder though, waking up the open source community once again to the care and attention needed when considering the use of “contributor agreements”.

While they’ve promised that they’re not going to do any such thing, Oracle could potentially change the MySQL license at any moment. Contributors needn’t be party to that decision as they sign away any copyright interests they have in the project when they sign the contributor agreement. For those starting new projects though, this incident highlights one of the reasons contributor agreements can detract from the health of a project. There are other alternatives that should be considered.

In this week’s InfoWorld article Simon takes a look at contributor agreements, commenting on the practices of duel licensing and copyright aggregation along the way. What is the best way to make sure that your community flourishes?