Do We Need a Covenant for Open Source Businesses?

It's no secret that businesses built around open source tend to favour one model in particular - that involving dual licensing. The basic idea is simple.

A company acquires the copyright of the main codebase, which might begin life as a small-scale, single-coder project, and is then “taken commercial” thanks to a little greasing of palms (providing a well-earned payback for all those hours of lonely coding.) 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Qt Goes LGLP: the Trolltech Saga Attains Closure

There are few commercial programs whose history is more intertwined with the rise of free software than Nokia's Qt toolkit, originally created by the Norwegian company Trolltech. As one of the company's founders, Haarvard Nord, told me nearly ten years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code, Qt began life as a purely proprietary product, but with a free version specifically aimed at free software programmers...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Perens Goes Peripatetic

Bruce Perens has achieved the remarkable feat of being one of the leading figures in the open source world without ever becoming a fixture anywhere for very long. Apparently, he's off again:

I have left Sourcelabs, and am planning another start-up. Stanley is in 2nd grade now, which leaves me with time to be a CEO again.

It will be interesting to see where he lands.

Open Hardware Licence

Another Bruce Perens production:

Many hardware designers wish to engage in collaborative development, just as Open Source programmers do today. The proliferation of programmable gate array devices and cheap circuit board prototyping are making this easier. One organization of hardware designers, TAPR, has produced and successfully manufactured innovative digital communications hardware designs since the 1980's, when they pioneered the first practical peer-to-peer wireless networking device.

This license will be deployed on a new wave of Open Source hardware. It is designed to be similar enough to Open Source Software licenses to be certifable under the Open Source Definition / Debian Free Software Guidelines, the generally-accepted definition of Open Source licensing, which I created in 1998.