FOSS licenses upheld!
After a five-year struggle in US Federal District Court, Robert Jacobson recently prevailed in his copyright infringement claim against Matthew Katzer as a result of Katzer’s alleged misappropriation of open source code from Jacobson’s Java Model Railroad Interface project. You can read all of the story in more detail at ConsortiumInfo.org. The end result is a [...]
GPL, WordPress and Themes
I saw an intriguing post the other day by Jennifer Schiffer on WordPress, themes and the GPL. She linked to a video of Matt Mullenweg (one of WordPress’ lead developers) who was talking about why WordPress was a GPL product (short answer: they didn’t really have a choice because WP is based on b2, which [...]
Business Continuity
A lot of conversations have been going on recently regarding source code escrow and business continuity: here, here and here. Wow. Regardless of whether you’re talking about on-premise applications or SaaS “hosted” apps, business continuity is a pretty important issue. Many organizational leaders are extremely worried about making sure that their infrastructure is stable enough [...]
This Week on The Web 2009-08-23
The things that happened around the web this week – maybe you already read about them, maybe you need to again: no one wants money but everyone wants something that money can buy: http://bit.ly/KGzyN (@vpynchon – even if she’s on vacation) BSA softens anti-piracy msg: http://bit.ly/2027C Too bad there’s not an attempt-version of piracy yet [...]
Delivering Perfection
In thousands of meetings over the years, I’ve been privvy to a very common conversation. It’s a discussion of deliverables – what is needed, what is wanted, how much money is available to pay for the needs/wants, who can create the best solution, etcetera. Regardless of the actual nature of the deliverable, the basics are [...]
Source Code Escrow Demystified
When purchasing a million dollar software product with a quarter-million dollar implementation and 18% annual maintenance fee, it’s probably reasonable to guess that the buyer expects to keep the product around for a little while. The fear is that the vendor, however well intentioned, won’t be able to survive in this interesting world of mergers, [...]
Open Wha?
[OK... my bad... things got a bit busy yesterday.] I live in Raleigh, NC – home to RedHat Software. Most of you have heard of RedHat as a result of their linux offering. But more than that, almost everyone has heard of RedHat because they sell free software. Initially, this was absolutely dumbfounding, confusing even [...]
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