Category Archives: Postings

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.

FLOSS Weekly Features OSCON

Perhaps you spotted Simon at OSCON last week? There was a lot going on and a great atmosphere. In the midst of it all Simon found a little time to carry out a series of interviews with an eclectic collection of interesting, key attendees. The interviews form the heart of this weeks FLOSS episode and cover a diverse selection of topics including Ubuntu phone, applied neuroscience, open source online video platform “Kaltura” and the need for hosting providers to be a part of the open source community.

 

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 →

Tesla Coil Music at FISL

While at FISL in Porto Alegre last week, attendees were treated to a musical interlude – performed by a Tesla coil!

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 →

Internet Hall of Fame Inducts New Members

The Internet Hall of Fame was started last year by the Internet Society as an annual awards program to celebrate those who have made a significant contribution towards the internet’s development and advancement. This year a further 32 names have been announced as new additions to the hall of fame.

Congratulations to all of those who are being inducted into the hall of fame this year and our thanks as well for enabling the internet to become what it has.

A number of names on the list stand out as being of particular note to those of us concerned with digital and intellectual property rights. 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?