A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought centered around service-based and other ancillary sales for supporting free software. Based on this kind of thinking, it’s fairly easy to imagine extending free licensing ideas to utilitarian works. But what about aesthetic works? The Creative Commons was established in 2002, largely to solve the kinds of licensing problems that aesthetic works might encounter, and it has been remarkably successful, pushing the envelope of even this newer wave of thought. Today, Creative Commons licensed works number in at least the tens of millions. And more than a quarter of those are using the free “Attribution” or “Attribution-ShareAlike” licenses.

Microsoft. Open-Source Certification. This is not an April Fools, apparently. According to various news feeds (this was brought to my attention from PCWorld, but YMMV as these stories are periodic) they will be submitting some of their “shared source” licenses to the OSI. This is genuinely fantastic news, as after years of FUDing us around, they finally admit that Open Source exists, is a good thing, non-cancerous, and something with which they want to get involved. It’s also very flattering, because since they’re submitting to the OSI it tells us that they acknowledge the term “Open Source” (and by its implication “Free Software”) and that its definition is vested and controlled. By someone else.

But now they’ve built the bridge, they need to know how to cross it. There’s a cultural divide that has been fostered through the years. So listen up Microsoft, this is your next step in allowing shared source to become compatible with FOSS licenses and - more importantly - its inherent ideals!

How does License Proliferation effect medical software and what can we do about it? How to choose a license for your medical software project? What are the implications for the medical FOSS community of various software licenses? This is intended to be a complete guide to free and open source software licensing for medical software. Please comment on how I can make it better.

Sharing medical software: FOSS licensing in medicine

According to Bruce Perens, discussion draft 3 of GPLv3 is due to be published on Wednesday March 28th:

Mylatest blog entry began with this paragraph:

Messing with MP3 files is, for some people, a synonym for illegal use of copyrighted music. Well, actually it’s not.

The reason I wrote that incipit remained unclear to many, that didn’t seeany link between this first phrase and the rest of the article. I therefore decided towrite a few blog entries on the subject. This time I’ll talk about theMP3 format in itself.

Robin Miller recently published a story on Newsforge about “Stan”[1], as an example of a situation that demonstrates proprietary software is a danger to business continuity. I found this story interesting since I think Mr. Miller came close to correctly identifying a core issue, which is that the proprietary software business model as it exists today both facilitates and encourages vendors to act in bad faith. However, it did not need to have been this way, and really comes down to misuse of licensing along with some deliberate abuse and exploitation of existing commercial law.