OStatic

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.