Open Source Archive

Users will be free to comment on the upcoming complex and technical draft versions of the GNU General Public License 3.0 in an easy way, according to Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. However, Moglen said Wednesday, speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here, the rewrite of the GPL is not an election and there will be no voting on its clauses.

The U.K.-based Alfresco kicked off the Open Source Business Conference by unveiling the first production release of its open source content management software. Company CEO John Powell is hoping that an all-encompassing approach to content management, along with the low cost of open source software, will be enough to help his company gain market share in the face of stiff proprietary competition.

"Bounty Source is a progressive step in project management for Free Open Source Software communities. In addition to the standard tools needed for managing an active community, we allow people to "put their money where their mouth" is by offering monetary rewards (bounties) toward the development of solutions to bug reports and feature requests. The end result of the bounty system is the creation of a catalyst that will increase development activity throughout all projects that choose to take advantage of Bounty Source."

"DR-DOS released DR-DOS 8.1 in the beginning of this month. But instead of an upgrade of the previous DR-DOS 8.0, it's something completely different. The kernel is a badly patched copy of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel old version 7.01.06 without any credit to its author Udo Kuhnt. The other programs and drivers included are old versions of some popular open source, freeware and shareware products without licenses, documentation or even credit to their authors. This means that DR-DOS 8.1 is just a bunch of old tools plus a compilation of others' works, obviously sold without permission and in violation of their license terms."

Nearly half of European local government bodies are using open source software while nearly a third don't know that they are using open source at all. A Maastricht University survey of 12 counties has reportedly found 49 per cent using Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) while 70 per cent said they expect usage to increase.

Eben Moglen, the general counsel for the Free Software foundation, discusses issues surrounding the GPL 3 licence in this mini-interview. Moglen also talks about his feelings on the Creative Commons licence set, and how the kernel developers may approach the new GPL.

The source code of one of the world's most popular free security tools will no longer be available to all, with its creator stating its open source licence was fuelling competition against his company. "Nessus 3 will be available free of charge ... But will not be released under the GPL," wrote Renaud Deraison yesterday to the software's email mailing list.

It is evident open-source software has and will continue to impact the software industry and the business models of new and existing companies, as both start-ups and large entrenched players vie to keep ahead of open-source projects. For instance, Marc Fleury's JBoss came out of the blocks as a poster child for the open-source movement.

Open-source databases will not succeed without commercial support, says Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. "One of the myths of open-source is that it's built by a bunch of guys who work at RadioShack."

"The growing popularity of open-source browsers and software may be responsible for the increasing gap between the exposure of a vulnerability and the provision of patch to fix it, security software vendor Symantec has said."

In a move that shows just how far Microsoft has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products. Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year.

In ever-growing numbers, CIOs want to take advantage of the many benefits that free and open-source software have to offer their companies. But there's a snag. Their lawyers can be grouchy when it comes to open-source.

A week ago the news got out that Microsoft had approached OSDL for a comperative study between Linux and Windows. OSDL confirmed this, however, they did not provide an answer to Microsoft's request. On Friday, Joe Brockmeier had a chance to have a short talk with Cohen , and got a definitive answer. Cohen said that "there is no way we would do a joint research project with Microsoft."

Richard Stallman, chair of the Free Software Foundation, said on Thursday that the Linux trademark fracas in Australia has distracted attention away from the real issue - that of freedom to distribute and change software.