OStatic

Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

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.

When it comes to putting together an open source project, a little up-front footwork goes a long way. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish, and to stay safe. Fortunately, just as free availability is a mantra for open source products, it is for many helpful resources too.

In this post, I'll round up a number of good, free resources to pay attention to if you're doing an open source project--or if your organization is deploying open source software.

As open source grows, so do the legal kerfuffles surrounding it. Today, Red Hat is pulling headlines for merely hiring two big gun IP attorneys, and last week Gartner researchers warned of possible strings of lawsuits from Microsoft following its new openness initiative.

You can never be too careful about the law if you're working in the open source world. If you want a free, downloadable resource that does quite an exhaustive job of covering the legal issues pertaining to open source, you can now get the Software Freedom Law Center's Legal Issue Primer.