OStatic

In December, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed suit against Cisco, after several years of urging the company to comply with the licensing terms used on its Linksys routers. Several Linksys routers used firmware licensed under the GPL/LGPL, but Cisco failed to make the source code available per the terms of the licenses.

It's not terribly easy to make the FSF resort to legal action, but after five years of relative unresponsiveness, FSF licensing compliance engineer Brett Smith said the organization had to take stronger measures to get the problem resolved.

The case against Cisco has been settled, with Cisco agreeing to appoint a Free Software Director who will ensure Linksys complies with the terms of the free licenses it uses, and report back to the FSF on its progress.

How do you know when a proposed software contract principle is really broken? When the Linux Foundation and Microsoft have their respective legal departments sit down and pen a joint letter asking it be reconsidered. ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley has written a nice, legalese-free summation of the story.

In short, the American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed some guiding principles for judges, lawyers and other legal professionals working with software-related cases to aid in settling software licensing issues. Given how quickly everything about software delivery and production changes, this in and of itself is a decent enough idea. The problem is one particular principle, a policy calling for a non-disclaimable implied warranty of no material hidden defects. Both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft say this is a disadvantage all around -- discriminating and subtlely changing between various licensing, business, and distribution models.

Recently, Black Duck Software conducted a survey of developers to ascertain what they know about open source software, and how they've used it in their workplaces.

While it's important to keep in mind that the survey consisted of about 50 participants at companies that were vastly different in size (ranging from less than 20 to more than 10,000 employees), and that Black Duck is in the business of servicing managed and secure open source deployments, there are still valid bits of information to take away from the results.

Information Week highlights some of the more interesting statistics the Black Duck surveyors collected. Even if the percentages in this impromptu survey would vary with a larger survey pool, the data is so vastly different it's safe to say there's a disturbing trend: Companies often take a hands off approach to managing open source software.

Joi Ito and the Creative Commons need help getting the word out -- and defined. Creative Commons licenses allow (to varying degrees) the content they apply to to be freely used, distributed, and altered, with varying levels of attribution or certain restrictions on commercial use. One of the gray areas Creative Commons has been grappling with is how exactly one defines non-commercial.

The Creative Commons team asks any one willing to take some time and fill out their questionnaire prior to December 7th. The survey is completely anonymous, and the study is open to the general public.

For most people, the most important part of a software license is the end. That's because they're totally uninterested in the license itself; they are merely interested in scrolling past it, so that they can click on OK and install the software that they are running. For users of open-source software, however, licenses should be extremely important, because they determine what you may and may not do with a particular program. Open-source developers have long debated the merits of the GNU General Public License vs. the BSD License. As open-source software becomes mainstream, and is integrated into larger systems, these age-old arguments are less theoretical than ever, and should be understood not only by developers, but also by managers and executives of organizations working with open source. Van Lindberg's new book is an excellent place to start.

We've previously covered some of the (minor) controversy surrounding the choice of licenses for projects hosted at the Google Code site. In a nutshell, the Google open source folks are concerned about the proliferation of free and open source licenses, and one way in which they choose to make a stand is by limiting the licenses that projects on their site can use. As they point out, there are plenty of other hosting sites you can use - but being Google, their opinion does have some weight.

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

A court case that might otherwise not have much significance for most OStatic readers - it centers around a dispute between two vendors of model train software - has given rise to an unexpectedly-clear ruling on the merits of open source licenses. As reported by Groklaw and Lawrence Lessig, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (who are the last resort before the Supreme Court for this sort of case) has upheld the basic theory that most open source licenses are based on.

There's been a lot of talk about cloud computing lately, including some excellent crystal-ball reading from our parent blog GigaOM. But it's an essay from the ever-interesting Tim O'Reilly that brings together the cloud and the future of open source - and some of his conclusions may distress those who are firmly convinced that open source licenses are the only way forward.

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.