Category Archives: Postings

Cause, Effect and License Choice

Choosing between licenses – even copyleft vs non-reciprocal – is less important than ensuring everyone has equal rights & responsibilities.

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I’m often asked which open source licence is best for businesses who want to release a project as open source. Usually behind the question the issue is a desire for corporate control somewhere in the organisation. This tends to flow from a conviction the only way a business can succeed is by keeping some sort of copyright (or patent) control that creates an artificial scarcity.  Continue reading →

Permission In Advance

Open source ensures developers already have permission to innovate and don’t need to ask first.

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If you want your code to be open source, it needs an OSI-approved copyright license. Code with no license to the copyright isn’t open source. But project success needs more than just an OSI-approved license — it needs “permission in advance” for every developer and deployer. Continue reading →

Compliance Is Not Just For Copyleft

The cost of compliance may not just be a copyleft issue now we understand how to work with the GPL.

Aerial view of a canyon meandering

Even before Christoph Hellwig (backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy) started his suit to enforce his copyright claims against VMWare, there was a great deal of fear of the GPL in particular and copyleft licensing in general among corporate lawyers, and hence among their executive clients.  Continue reading →

Control Or Consensus?

You’re entitled to your opinion but in open source licensing only the consensus of the community really matters.

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In a recent conversation on the Apache Legal mailing list, a participant opined that “any license can be Open Source. OSI doesn’t ‘own’ the term.” He went on to explain “I could clone the Apache License and call it ‘Greg’s License’ and it would be an open source license.”  Continue reading →

On Butter and Triangulation

Data protection laws are about controlling triangulation, not (just) direct privacy

Squirrel peering from behind log

At the end of May 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in Europe. It creates a whole set of new responsibilities that are causing concern for businesses across the EU. It has effects outside Europe as well, because it will control the way businesses located in Europe can share data across borders, both within their company and with other companies.  Continue reading →

MP3 Is Dead! Long Live MP3!

Ignore the coverage saying MP3 is dead. Now all the patents blocking it have expired, it can start to live!

Finally Free

Back in May, there was an unexpected surge in press coverage about the MP3 audio file format. What was most unexpected about it was it all declared that the venerable file format is somehow “dead”. Why did that happen, and what lessons can we learn?
Continue reading →

Java EE to Eclipse: A Welcome Move

It looks like Java EE may finally be fully free.

Java Celebration

In a blog post on the venerable Aquarium blog (started by the Glassfish team at Sun a decade or so ago) Oracle has announced that it has selected the Eclipse Foundation as the new home for Java EE. They will relicense and rename it and invent a new standards process. It looks like the MicroProfile rebellion was successful as this has all been negotiated with Red Hat and IBM as well.  Continue reading →

Simon’s article explaining why the Facebook license combo used for React.js and much more is a problem was published by the Red Hat OpenSource.Com site today. Because our articles are supported by Patreon Patrons and not reliant on artificial scarcity to pay the bills, we were able to offer Red Hat the article in response to the one by Facebook’s outside counsel yesterday. A win for the patronage economy!

Read and respond here.

Open Source Means Choice Of Insurance

No, using open source doesn’t automatically mean going it alone.

Small Fish

Some say that companies don’t want open source because they want the security of a relationship with a big business. But this outlook reflects misunderstandings of the real values of open source. It’s yet another consequence of the “price frame”.  Continue reading →

No To “No Hacking” Clauses

Trying to ban clever hacks in an open source licence is not OK.

Rocks

A correspondent asks about the Open Source Definition (OSD):

“Does OSD 6 mean I can’t include a clause in a new open source license that prohibits hacking?”

Yes, you are correct – that’s called a “field of use restriction” (FoU) and copyright licenses that contain field of use restrictions are not approved as open source. Open source licenses are for guaranteeing software freedom, nothing more or less. Continue reading →