Software Free

As part of a trend for opening up publicly funded data, the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information Taskforce has set up a competition to fund projects using public data: Show us a better way. From the site:

The Power of Information Taskforce is helping government become more open, transparent and effective through better use of published information.

This competition is asking for your help in developing better ways to publish the vast swathes of non-personal information that the government collects & creates on your behalf

Public data is your data. Tell us what you’d build with it and you could win £20k to develop your idea to the next level.

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Source: opencontentlawyer.com

On Open Enterprise blog.

TechCrunch IT are reporting that Nokia has bought Symbian Ltd, the software development company famous for creating the proprietary operating system for mobile devices, Symbian OS.

At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 database-management software under an open-source licence.

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for May 31st through June 6th, 2008.

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.

Pentaho Corp., the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that its current version 2 alpha release of the Pentaho BI Platform, as well as future versions, will be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2).

Law.com recently ran a sensationalist piece by Edmund J. Walsh warning of the impending “dangerous real world business dispute” in store for any for-profit company that uses free software. Walsh points to lawsuits filed by SFLC on behalf BusyBox as a source of this danger, and having worked on those lawsuits, I hope I can provide a helpful counterpoint.

In the last-post, I went through the most popular Firefox extensions and talked about whether they were good ideas or not. However, it seems that not a lot of people think about another side to this, i.e. what are your Firefox extensions licenced under?

Google snubs a very good software licence and makes a Web-based software feature Windows-only.

The best open source protection for “the cloud,” as Gordon Haff notes today, is the Affero GPL license. (Picture from our Tech Republic’s GeekEnd blog, written by Jay Garmon.)vv