Open-source programmer rebuts charge
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A programmer has rebutted an accusation that he contributed proprietary software to an open-source project called Mambo, while his accuser has moderated his legal threats.
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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.
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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.The number of licenses sold gives vendors of proprietary software a pretty good idea of how many people are using their code, assuming there are not too many pirated copies in use, or licensed copies gathering dust on shelves. They can also draw on information about paid upgrades or service contracts, or sell unique license keys, verified by a central server each time the software is installed -- or even used.Open source software developers have no such luck; the very nature of open source licenses makes such verification methods impossible. One clue they have is a count of how many people have downloaded the software from their Web sites. Reaching 1 million downloads is a rite of passage for open source projects.&#160;SugarCRM, for example, passed that landmark in May.Such counts, though, may underestimate the number of users, as anyone who obtains open source software is free to redistribute it by any other means they choose -- as long as they accompany it with a copy of the open source license and make the source code readily available.On the other hand, they may wildly overestimate the number; people may download the software with no intention of using it, since there is no financial disincentive to doing so, or they may download it multiple times if they upgrade it, wipe and reinstall their system, or have several computers.To come up with an accurate figure for the number of users of various open source applications in the enterprise, OpenLogic has released an automated census tool, OSS Discovery, itself available under an open source license.It hopes that businesses will scan their machines using the tool and contribute the data about the applications they are using to an open database.The tool could offer advantages to IT managers too, said OpenLogic, enabling them to build up a picture of the software installed on desktops and servers around their business and compare it with that used in other enterprises.OpenLogic is looking for partners to distribute or deploy the software and wants open source software developers to contribute digital &quot;fingerprints&quot; of their applications that will enable the discovery tool to identify them. Those who help with the project will be offered access to the anonymous data gathered.OSS Discovery 2.0 is based on the company&#39;s OpenLogic Discovery tool and is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. This recently introduced license extends the GPL license to ensure that changes to software used to power publicly available services will be contributed to the free software community, even if the modified software is not itself distributed.OpenLogic hopes to begin collecting census data early next year.
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Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing.  Should they?
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For anyone who has been using open source for a while, the current commercial enthusiasm for communities, collaboration, and all things Web 2.0, is rather amusing.  After all, the idea that users are not to be regarded simply as passive and grateful recipients of whatever is handed down to them from on high, but need to be treated as partners and participants who can make valuable contributions to the formulation and development of new products, is central to the way that free software works.  But some companies that are starting to dabble with Web 2.0 ideas are discovering that you have to be careful what you wish for when you solicit this kind of user feedback.  Just ask Michael Dell.
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By its very nature, open-source software would appear to run counter to the goals of venture capitalists. Not only is it distributed and developed for free by a loose-knit group of techies from around the
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Blog: The software maker has a testy back and forth with a software maker that has created a utility that interacts with the free version of Visual Studio.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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InfoWorld - The Story: What???s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ???liberal.??? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ???commercial.???
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Simon Phipps defends the open-source roots of Sun and the GPL-ization of Java.
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Company says it paid for the code that was contributed, against contract, to free Mambo publishing software.
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Now for some real Apache code Column As I write this, I'm on the Eurostar train, just returning from O'Reilly's OSCon (Open Source Conference) in Brussels. Some fascinating insights there; and even my own talk generated some interesting discussion. Some of the delegates, including O'Reilly himself, are promoting opensource ideas going beyond software and into society more generally. I've touched on that in this very column before now, but a related argument that's new to me is that the open/closed debate in software could become largely sidelined, as the industry focuses on software as a service (such as Google's offerings) more than as a product.â¦
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More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.A number of corporations are moving into the free software arena, and this has resulted in legions of programmers, paid by companies, moving into free software communities, Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems said Friday at FOSS.IN, a conference on free and open-source software in Bangalore, India.This development has thrown up questions about how open-source developers on corporate payrolls can protect their freedom and rights from the demands of their employers, and resist corporate influences that may run counter to the free software community&#39;s interests.At the conference, an employee of an Indian government lab complained that his employment rules require him to turn in to the company any software developed by him, including what is done outside office hours.In this context, Danese Cooper, a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), who also advises Intel on its open source strategy, dedicated an entire session Friday at the FOSS.IN conference to outlining strategies employees can use to protect their autonomy from the &quot;corporate elephant&quot; that is both powerful and resistant to change.Historically, companies claimed rights to any software code written by their employees, but there are some changes, for example in California where employee agreements now allow the employee to retain the right to his work outside office hours, according to Cooper.&quot;Corporations are profit-driven, and are required to do well for their shareholders,&quot; Cooper said. To make profits, companies are going to shift their strategies quarterly, and employees may often find that projects they work on are cancelled, she said.&quot;Companies tend to like to think of their employees as interchangeable plug-ins, that can be renewed in different jobs,&quot; according to Cooper who added that this perception is slowly shifting as companies find that they are losing their employees.Companies also tend to want to manage open source projects, rather than facilitate them, to serve their business objectives, Cooper said. They demand, for example, that their staff work on open-source projects that are of interest to the company. Companies have created a pattern of working that lets them predict how much it is going to cost to do, and when it is going to get done, and though they have to change, it is taking them time to do it, she added.It is a lot harder to make money from offering support on open source software than from licensing software, according to Cooper. That is the reason employees should watch out for companies that have only halfheartedly embraced open source, she said. &quot;You see that specially in companies that throw code over the wall without any resource tree,&quot; she added.&quot;The open-source brand has become so powerful that people are trying to wear the brand, without wearing the behavior that goes with it,&quot; Phipps said.Employees are also likely to get caught up in ownership fights on contributions, on whether the contribution should be recognized on behalf of the employee, or the company. Even when employee contributions are recognized, it may be a figurehead rather than all the contributors that are recognized, Cooper said.The best path ahead for open source developers is to get more assertive when identifying the companies they would like to work with, and in negotiating agreements with companies that protect their rights.Employees should assert, for example, the right to blog and continue to participate in the projects they have been involved with, because these activities give them visibility beyond the company they work with, and also helps them if there is a dispute with an employer, Cooper said. &quot;Having a well-read blog is the best defense you can have against any problems you may encounter,&quot; she added.
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PC Magazine - Opinion: Microsoft's open-source pledge is a good step.
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Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:   don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT have never used some form of version control like Subclipse don't use a consistent methodology don't use test-driven development don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes return HTML, not data, strings, or objects. don't allow intelligent error handling you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP   Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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perspective Attorney Eric J. Sinrod explains the ramifications of a recent case on the future of open-source software.