OStatic

ActiveState (vendors of support and tools for dynamic languages including Perl, Python, and Tcl) just put out a free white paper aimed at the management level of businesses with questions about open source. Titled 10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business, it makes a reasonable primer for the executive who hasn't looked at open source before.

Iﾒm a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developerﾒs Journals site. Harris says that ﾔ KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesnﾒt really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.ﾔ

Now, a qualifier ﾗ Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ﾓpoisonousﾔ users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ﾓcontributeﾔ to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesnﾒt need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.

As we covered earlier today, Facebook has released a big chunk of its platform code as open source - using the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) for their main license. If you haven't been closely following the proliferation of open source licenses, this is probably a new one to you. As with any open source code, it's smart to understand your rights before you start depending on the new platform - especially since some of the provisions of the CPAL may surprise you.

Some people are suspicious about the growing power of Google - and some are downright upset. In the latter category we have bloggers Fabrizio Capobianco and Russell Beattie. They claim that Google is deliberately trying to slow the adoption of the Affero General Public License (AGPL) through not making it a choice for open source projects hosted by the Google Code public repository. Google in turn says they're just trying to combat license proliferation. Who's right in this he-said she-said argument?

Lovd by Less touts itself as an open-source platform for social networking. And indeed, the software itself is released under an open-source license, and provides some useful functionality. However, restrictions on some of its essential plug-ins raise questions about its actual licensing status.