OStatic

This week brings some interesting debates on open source licenses, their limits and shortcomings, and their strengths. For example, this post explores a number of misconceptions that people have about the General Public License (GPL), which is the license behind about two in three open source software projects, as shown by Black Duck Software here. The case discussed in the post concerns a Goldman Sachs Group programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, who was arrested--by the FBI, no less--and charged with stealing computer code designed to automate Goldman Sachs' massive trading business. Aleynikov's defense was that he was only trying to download open source software governed by the GPL.

Meanwhile, as Savio Rodrigues notes, on August 31st, a smackdown debate on open source licenses will take place in Ottawa, Canada. Luminaries from the open source world will each defend various types of open source licenses, and everyone is invited to submit questions for the smackdown. You can submit your questions here, and they'll be answered during the virtual event, which you can sign up for here.

If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google's SketchUp in a number of areas, it's still not much help for someone with no design sense.

This makes it even more odd that I was so excited when I spotted Elizabeth Krumbach's post on the open source, cross platform 3D interior design modeling application. I've lived in my house for nine years -- we have shades on all the windows, but only one window has actual curtains. It's just that SketchUp is a fun little application, and it's one of the only applications I've tried to run with WINE (and failed miserably in the attempt).

Sweet Home 3D, as Krumbach says, is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Because it's open source, there's the potential to model a structure (and the stuff that fills it) to a whole new level of precision. Perhaps the only drawback (and it could be a machine quirk, as everything's being difficult today) was its seeming somewhat crashprone on my Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit laptop. That could also be chalked up to my learning curve. But let's take a closer look.