OStatic

For most people, the most important part of a software license is the end. That's because they're totally uninterested in the license itself; they are merely interested in scrolling past it, so that they can click on OK and install the software that they are running. For users of open-source software, however, licenses should be extremely important, because they determine what you may and may not do with a particular program. Open-source developers have long debated the merits of the GNU General Public License vs. the BSD License. As open-source software becomes mainstream, and is integrated into larger systems, these age-old arguments are less theoretical than ever, and should be understood not only by developers, but also by managers and executives of organizations working with open source. Van Lindberg's new book is an excellent place to start.

We've previously covered some of the (minor) controversy surrounding the choice of licenses for projects hosted at the Google Code site. In a nutshell, the Google open source folks are concerned about the proliferation of free and open source licenses, and one way in which they choose to make a stand is by limiting the licenses that projects on their site can use. As they point out, there are plenty of other hosting sites you can use - but being Google, their opinion does have some weight.

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

A court case that might otherwise not have much significance for most OStatic readers - it centers around a dispute between two vendors of model train software - has given rise to an unexpectedly-clear ruling on the merits of open source licenses. As reported by Groklaw and Lawrence Lessig, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (who are the last resort before the Supreme Court for this sort of case) has upheld the basic theory that most open source licenses are based on.

There's been a lot of talk about cloud computing lately, including some excellent crystal-ball reading from our parent blog GigaOM. But it's an essay from the ever-interesting Tim O'Reilly that brings together the cloud and the future of open source - and some of his conclusions may distress those who are firmly convinced that open source licenses are the only way forward.

ActiveState (vendors of support and tools for dynamic languages including Perl, Python, and Tcl) just put out a free white paper aimed at the management level of businesses with questions about open source. Titled 10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business, it makes a reasonable primer for the executive who hasn't looked at open source before.

I?m a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developer?s Journals site. Harris says that ? KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn?t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.?

Now, a qualifier ? Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ?poisonous? users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ?contribute? to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesn?t need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.

As we covered earlier today, Facebook has released a big chunk of its platform code as open source - using the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) for their main license. If you haven't been closely following the proliferation of open source licenses, this is probably a new one to you. As with any open source code, it's smart to understand your rights before you start depending on the new platform - especially since some of the provisions of the CPAL may surprise you.

Some people are suspicious about the growing power of Google - and some are downright upset. In the latter category we have bloggers Fabrizio Capobianco and Russell Beattie. They claim that Google is deliberately trying to slow the adoption of the Affero General Public License (AGPL) through not making it a choice for open source projects hosted by the Google Code public repository. Google in turn says they're just trying to combat license proliferation. Who's right in this he-said she-said argument?

Lovd by Less touts itself as an open-source platform for social networking. And indeed, the software itself is released under an open-source license, and provides some useful functionality. However, restrictions on some of its essential plug-ins raise questions about its actual licensing status.