Free software is about freedom from control. This article discusses how the free software ideals should be applied to hosted personal health record software and how Microsoft’s newest PHR, HealthVault, is a threat to free software.

Heard about HealthVault?

When we consider the situation Microsoft finds itself in with regard to the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is important to consider how one determines when someone has accepted the GNU GPL and, hence, when someone is actually bound by its terms. Many people receive software that has been licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL all the time. However, simply receiving software licensed under the GNU GPL does not, in itself, mean that one has accepted the terms. Indeed, there is no contract to sign when receiving said software and certainly no “End User License Agreement”.

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:

Today marks the rebirth of Java. Sun has announced their intent to release thesource code for Java under the GPL. If this isn’t some of the bestnews in a long time, I don’t know what is.

The freeing of Java

Sun isn’t releasing all of the code. It seems there are partsof Java Sun doesn’t own, and for which Sun hasn’t been able tonegotiate releasing under the GPL. But, it appears this is a tiny bitof the code.

Days ago I read this announcement about Sun moving Java’s license to free software, and in particular that some parts of it will be released under the GPL

www.sun.com early this morning (GMT+1)

Today on www.sun.com they are announcing a webcast today at 9.30 Pacific Time

Are we nearly there?

UPDATE:

we are:

Now that the new versions of Ghostscript are available under the free software GPL license other projects relying on Ghostscript can be fully GPL software as well. One of these projects, PDFCreator, I recently tested and I must admit I’m impressed.

PDFCreator allows you to make a PDF of anything you can print, documents, spreadsheet, presentations, anything with a print function. PDFCreator even has encryption and security features that would make it perfect for a corporate environment.

With the draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) have come many interesting comments, although not all of which I have found positive. While I understand proprietary vendors have offered complaints against a license they do not even use, I was surprised that Linus Torvalds had taken some issues which I thought were in any case misguided criticisms.

With the introduction of the GNU GPLv3, the GNU Lesser General Public License (L-GPL) has seen much less attention. This has changed with the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, and I think it has changed for the better.