Recent Posts

Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free

Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free blog posting has some useful insights for people trying to profit from their Open Source development. He speaks of “Generatives”, which are attributes of something…

User Licenses vs. Contributor Licenses

I’m starting to think that the dynamics of Open Source production are such that user licenses are crap. Yes, I’m saying that everything that we’ve put into licenses, all the thought, all the drama, all the durm-und-strang, is wasted. You might wonder why.

A split FTC sides with standards over patents

Andy Updegrove posts yet another insightful analysis on the evolution of standards in the modern technology. He reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided 3-to-2 that a licensing promise made in a standards development process trumps the private right to hold licensees for ransom when a 3rd party later acquires the patent. This is bad news for patent trolls, but great news for the rest of us.

Is Ardour top of the charts?

The Ardour project is an open source digital audio workstation. To many in the recording studio business, digital audio workstation is written DAW. Unwritten is widely held belief that recording studio platforms come in two varieties: proprietary native platforms like Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows, and DigiDesign’s HD system (which is a proprietary hardware add-on). Ardour demonstrates that there is a new game in town, and that new game is open source.

(Too-)Simple licenses

We’ve gotten a number of licenses submissions over the years, which attempt to be “succinter than thou”. I guess that people feel that even a license as simple as the…

‘Tis The Season (to donate to the OSI)

Most of you know me as President of the Open Source Initiative, but I am also Chair of the Fundraising Committee. Over the years we have raised monies large and small from companies large and small, public and private, and we have had great participation from individual donors as well. In fact, this year was probably a record in terms of the total number of different people supporting the OSI–which is cause alone to celebrate.

New Mailing Lists and Charters

Hi everyone, As promised, we’ve dramatically expanded and rechartered the OSI mailing lists. In particular, we have split license review and general OSI issue discussions out from “license-discuss” list, to…