You know open source has really arrived when they start bringing in the lawyers. The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) announced last week the formation of an organization that will provide free legal services for developers of free and open-source software (FOSS). The Software Freedom Law Center was established to offer advice on licensing, to show developers how to avoid intellectual property (IP) claims, and to defend against litigation when such claims arise.
A panel of Linux luminaries took the stage at last week's Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Linux Summit and held forth on a range of topics, from the threat of software patents to the challenges of making a career in open source.
Sun Microsystems is set to unveil its strategy for open sourcing its Solaris operating system Tuesday, Jan. 24, beginning immediately with the DTrace utility. The source code for DTrace, Sun's new dynamic tracing framework, will be available for download Tuesday at opensolaris.org. The company is promising to provide "buildable code" from the upcoming Solaris 10 release by the second quarter.
IBM seen challenging software industry with release of patents to open source community.
It's easy to think of Microsoft and open source as implacable enemies. But in
fact, many people are building open source code with Microsoft tools, and others
use open source tools to build proprietary software. In this book, Brian Nantz
surveys some of the intersections and provides plenty of pointers to good tools
and sample code.
If its manufacturers can guarantee uninterrupted service, Linux could gain traction in the enterprise as a messaging platform within the next two years, according to a recent survey.
Three IT industry heavyweights, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, and NEC Corp., are releasing Reliable Messaging for Grid Services (RM4GS), an open-source implementation of the Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard.
ObjectWeb, the open-source infrastructure consortium, announced this week that it has added eXo Platform SARL to its roster. The privately held French company provides support and services for the eXo Platform, an open-source enterprise portal, which will now be hosted by ObjectWeb.
Sun Microsystems launched the much-anticipated new version of its Solaris operating system this week, and announced an overhauled pricing model designed to compete with Linux.
Well, maybe not yet. But what does the future hold for those who consider their source code an important proprietary asset?
Wikis are Web sites that anyone can edit. This seems like a recipe for disaster,
but in fact they can be surprisingly resilient.
IBM is donating some of its software for speech-enabling applications to two open-source organizations: the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation.
The extension of patent law to cover software raises great dangers for an industry that has become increasingly litigious over the past decade.
As Java coders make greater use of open-source tools, they need a way to organize and coordinate software downloads from the groups that make up the open-source community, argues Andy Grolnick, VP marketing at OpenLogic.
Microsoft continues to treat the GPL as anathema, even when to do otherwise
would benefit their customers.