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.

A (Final) Few Words on FRAND Licensing

The issue of Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing has cropped up quite a few times in these pages. The last time I wrote about the subject was just last week, when I noted that the Business Software Alliance was worried that the imminent European Interoperability Framework (EIF) might actually require truly open standards, and so was pushing for FRAND instead.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Could this Lawsuit Undermine the GNU GPL?

As I've noted before, it's pretty well established that the GNU GPL stands up in the courts: gone are the days when detractors of copyleft could claim it would “never work”. But the GPL is still under attack, only in more subtle ways, so the open source world can't just sit back and relax.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Can You Make Money from Free Stuff?

Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into fee. Here's an interesting move that demonstrates that quite nicely.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Clever Old Cleversafe

I have been a bit remiss in not mentioning Cleversafe before. It's a company with a very, er, clever idea, which has been open source from the start. It's just released a new version of its free code, and this gives me a good opportunity to to make up for past sins of omission....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Palamida's Mark Tolliver

On Open Enterprise blog.

In Praise of the Public Domain

I write a lot about licensing here. Indeed, licensing arguably lies at the heart of free software. But there's another important way of looking at things, which is essentially licence-less, as John Wilbanks reminds us:

It is a damn shame that we no longer think of the public domain as an option that is attractive. It’s a sign of the victory of the content holders that the free licensing movements work against that something without a license – something that is truly free, not just just free “as in” – is somehow thought to be worse. We’ve bought into their games if we allow the public domain to be defined as the BSD. The idea of the public domain has been subjected to continuous erosion thanks to both the big content companies and our own movements, to the point where we think freedom only comes in a contract.

The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of “freedom” we’re playing a dangerous game.

How true. Which means that those of us in the free software world must be careful that we don't play into the hands of those who want *everything* to be licensed.

Has MySQL Forgotten All It Learnt?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Creative Commons Discovers Dual Licensing

I missed this before:

This is the CC+ project. An artist, for example, can release her work under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license, but then, using the CC+ infrastructure, enable those who want commercial rights (or anything else beyond the freedoms granted in the license) to link to a site that can provide those other rights. In this way, CC now helps support a hybrid economy of creativity. We provide a simple platform to protect and enable those who want to share; and we’ve built a simple way to cross over from that sharing economy for those who want to profit from their creativity.

Er, yes, this is called dual licensing in the open source world....