Activists Urge Free Open-Source Software
8079
Activists at a leftist gathering where Microsoft is viewed as a corporate bogeyman urged developing nations Saturday to leap into the information age with free open-source software.
357304
Group seeks to promote development through microfinance, using open-source software.
42379
A number of software makers and well-known IT vendors have agreed to endorse the Free Standards Group&#39;s latest Linux standard to help create common ground for companies building open-source technologies, the organization said Monday.
388912
The South African startup is starting in earnest a push to make money off the free version of Ubuntu Linux.
317282
In a bid to bring Linux to the marketplace, the open-source community and manufacturers agree on new rules for Linux. The often unruly world of open-source software drew closer to marching in lockstep Monday
535452
Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.The project stems from governance work done in-house at HP, according to the Web site set up for the project.&quot;We needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open-source project was licensed,&quot; a statement on the site reads. &quot;Rather than simply collecting a project&#39;s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.&quot;FOSSology is available under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2 and currently has support on most GNU/Linux platforms, according to the site.It is not clear from the site how HP plans to make money through the initiative. A company spokeswoman declined comment and said Friday that more details will be announced next week.Companies like Black Duck Software are already in the FOSS-tracking business.HP&#39;s entry brought a warm welcome from Black Duck CEO Doug Levin. Levin may feel HP&#39;s involvement will help the market expand overall. &quot;We can now officially welcome HP to our market,&quot; Levin wrote on his blog . &quot;FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.&quot;Right now, the FOSSology project has modules for license analysis, MIME type identification and for extracting metadata, according to the site.The site said the tool already generates detailed results: &quot;More than simply reporting, &#39;Package X uses license Y,&#39; the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package.&quot;FOSSology&#39;s analyses aren&#39;t foolproof, however, a statement on the site concedes: &quot;In general, the analysis results are very good guesses but should not be considered authoritative. (Or to say it simply: We&#39;re not lawyers. The code tries its best, but leave the legal decisions up to your own attorneys.)&quot;Over time, FOSSology is meant to be far more than an open-source license tracker, according to the site. Future capabilities could address bug fixes and patches, security alerts, and code reuse, as well as analysis of all types of software.The effort prompted praise on Friday from Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;It&#39;s free and open source, which is nice,&quot; Cote said. &quot;So if the data is reliable and well-fed, it could be of help for people who don&#39;t want to work with Black Duck ... and others who have commercial ways to scan for open-source licenses.&quot;&quot;The interesting thing will be to see how open the resulting data is and how much reporting people do with it,&quot; he added. &quot;There&#39;s a sort of cloudy idea of how much open source is used in the enterprise, and having more accurate, free numbers would be great for the community, and more importantly, enterprises that want to get a feel for how widely used open source software is.&quot;The availability of free open-source usage data &quot;will help people make much better -- and affordable -- decisions about what open source to use and not use,&quot; Cote said.
396472
TechWeb - A UK government report encourages public agencies to consider using Linux and other open-source alternatives to commercial software.
431542
Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
259085
Open-source software is nipping more sharply at the heels of Microsoft, leading the software giant to defend itself more fiercely than ever against the insurgent rise of freely distributed, collaboratively coded programs. -washingtonpost.com
341611
Back-and-forth dance characterizes dispute over code released to open-source Mambo project.
22248
Founder of open-source e-mail and calendaring software project decides to move on while calling on community to continue.
438882
Blog: The Software Freedom Law Center is offering a free day of open source legal education.  Send your counsel.  This is a must-attend event.
13315
Industry group will offer a free program to help users find and eliminate illegal files. The Motion Picture Association of America this week announced that it has begun filing lawsuits against people who use
8226
In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., a lawsuit has been filed to enforce an open-source license.
473999
Open-source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open-source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census-- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.
436539
Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
138357
Not since SCO has there been a company so reviled by the open source community as Novell following its deal with Microsoft.  Already there are some clear signs of the negative effects of that anger: senior coders have left the company; Novell has posted a loss for the most recent quarter; and there are calls for a boycott of Novell products â to say nothing of imminent changes to the GNU GPL that might well nullify the entire Novell-Microsoft deal.  Some people are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of Novell crashing and burning completely, but such a development could actually turn out to be one of the worst things to happen to free software.