Open Source Archive

Gus Robertson, vice president of Red Hat Asia-Pacific said open source has helped lower the cost of IT but there are far more strategic reasons for choosing open-source software over proprietary competitors. However, Dion Wiggins, research director and vice president of Gartner in Hong Kong, advised businesses against having a strategy specifically for open source.

"The third annual Software Freedom Day will take place worldwide on September 16. Project organizers say the event, designed to raise awareness about the benefits of using free software, is drawing more interest this year than ever before, with participation from 150 countries."

"With the recent release of the second draft of the GNU General Public License version 3, digital rights management is back in the news. The new draft may raise concerns about the rewording of section 3 of the license, which deals with DRM. The Free Software Foundation dislikes the term "digital rights management" and instead choose to call it digital "restrictions" management. But many people don't understand the implications of DRM on free software like Linux."

"There are a lot of reasons why people make their code open source. I believe that one of the strongest original motivations has often been overlooked. Our hagiography tells the tale of how it all started with the quest for software freedom. But contemporaneous with Richard Stallman's story, other people were taking the same path (releasing source code) for a very different reason: the architecture of Unix."

Plenty of loud argument has ensued over whether binary-only drivers belong in an operating system based on open source philosophies. David Chisnall examines the reasoning on both sides.

Linus Torvalds had harsh comments about the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation to help it draft version 3 of the GNU Public License. However, so far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree with Torvalds' assessment that the FSF isn't listening to feedback.

The second draft of the GPL version 3 license is not even a few days old and already one of the largest Linux vendors in the world is taking issue with its content. "HP had hoped that the second draft would clarify the patent provision such as to ease concern that mere distribution of a single copy of GPL-licensed software might have significant adverse IP impact on a company," said Christine Martino, vice president of Open Source And Linux with HP, in a statement. "Unfortunately, the concern lingers in draft 2." The first draft included some contentious terms surrounding DRM and patents; those terms have softened a bit in the second draft. Apparently, not quite enough for HP.

Red Hat's Havoc Pennington wrote a very interesting article on his blog about open source, services and GPLv3. In the piece Havoc argues that sometimes having open and unrestricted services is more important than having the actual source code. He raises the question about how the open source community can move towards a model of open services; he specifically wonders how to finance the associated deployment and maintainance costs. Havoc believes that the GPLv3 fails to address the issue of data access and focuses too much on source access, which he thinks becomes somewhat irrelevant in the growing "software as a service" world.

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business.

When organising the 3rd international GPLv3 conference, FSFE got the whole 2 days recorded and have now put the video and audio files online. There are also full transcripts, including the Q and A sessions of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

It's time for the Windows and Linux communities to drop the religious war and get together in a hurry to put the strengths of each operating system to best use, according to a nationally recognized authority on Windows Server. At the same time, Microsoft has been reaching out to the open-source community to try to find ways to overcome the incompatibilities between software distributed under the GNU General Public License and its own commercial software.

After Kororaa announced its GPL problems and me writing a column about it, the people behind Kororaa have now posted an in-depth follow-up: "I have been receiving lots of information which I have been sorting through, thank you to everyone who has emailed me (although I would have also thanked you personally via email). I contacted both ATI and nVidia for some clarification on particular issues, however neither have answered my questions. Nevertheless, this is what I have found so far."

"We have received an email claiming that the Kororaa Xgl Live CD is in violation of the GPL. I have been researching this as much as I can, asking many prominent people in the Linux world for their opinion. So far, no-one has agreed with the email, however a few have said to seek legal advice, which I cannot afford to do (but can't afford not to do, if I want to continue the Live CD). As such, the Live CD has been put on hold, until I can sort this out. If I cannot sort this out I will be forced to cease work on the Xgl Live CD."

Coverity has released the results of a Homeland Security Department-funded bug hunt that ranged across 40 popular open-source programs. The company found less than one-half of one bug per thousand lines of code on average, and found even fewer defects in the most widely used code, such as the Linux kernel and the Apache Web server.