Are you thinking of launching an open source project? Doing so successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you'll find our updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you're doing an open source project.

As reported here yesterday, Red Hat has hit a huge milestone by becoming the first "pure-play" open source company to lock down $1 billion in annual revenues. "The open source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement," said CEO Jim Whitehurst, in announcing the company's strong results. That's one way to interpret the milestone, but there are some other interesting ones appearing. Is there more power to Red Hat's unusual business model of supporting open source software than meets the eye?

For years, the Open Invention Network (OIN), has been focused on intellectual property and a royalty-free approach to promoting Linux, open source applications and a collaborative open source ecosystem. Now, OIN, has announced that it has significantly expanded and updated the Linux System technologies covered under its protective network of royalty-free cross-licenses among hundreds of OIN licensees.The upshot of this is that more than 700 new software packages -- including popular packages such as KVM, Git, OpenJDK, and WebKit -- will now receive royalty-free shelter under OIN, which could make it more friction-free for organizations and developers to adopt and modify open source technology.