Open Source Archive

Plans to update the General Public Licence, which underpins the distribution of most open source software, were released by the Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center yesterday. The first discussion draft of the new license – known as GPLv3 – will be released at a public conference, due to be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 16th and 17th January.

Open source behind closed doors: in the first of a two part series (part II) ZDNet looks at why some open source projects remain secret. "Lots of companies are using our products, they just aren't talking about it", is a popular excuse from software companies, particularly those that offer open source software and services. Deployment of open source software, particularly in the private sector, often appears to be a clandestine activity, with few companies prepared to discuss their involvement.

"For the last two years, I've been keeping track of the UN sponsored, International Telecommunication Union administered, World Summit on the Information Society process that held its first mass meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in December 2003. The process culminated last week with a meeting of over 19000 people in Tunis, Tunisia. I was reading the final reports emanating from the conference over the last several days, a question occurred to me. What happened to open source?"

ZDNet has published the second part (part I) of its special report on the use of open source in governments around the world. This time it's looking at what's driving open source takeup in developing markets, with a particularly close look at projects and the driving forces behind them in China, India and Brazil.

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."