Open-source Alfresco shifts to GPL
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Document management company hopes license change will mean more outside programmer involvement.
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The software maker offers a new service to add digital signatures to PDF documents.
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(InfoWorld) - The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. Although the earlier GPLv2 has been used with Linux, GPLv3, released by the Free Software Foundation June 29, presents problems, according to James Bottomley, gatekeeper of the Linux Kernel SCSI Maintainership, which governs disk storage access in the kernel. The Linux kernel is not owned by any one person; it is owned by all the people who submit patches to it, Bottomley said. This means the kernel is now owned by anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 people, he said. "In order to change the kernel, we'd have to get everybody who owns the kernel to sign off on the re-licensing," said Bottomley, who also is CTO of SteelEye Technology and a member of the Linux Foundation board of directors. This would be required under copyright law, he said. This presents obvious practical problems should the keepers of the kernel decide they want to move to GPL v3. "We'd have to find all of the owners, first of all," Bottomley said. The lack of a compelling advantage to GPLv3 "means we're not going to bother," Bottomley said. A plebiscite could be announced to decide the issue, but a code contributor still could object to any switch, said Bottomley. "The choice at that point would be to rewrite their code or abandon the process," he said. The GPLv2 and v3 licenses are incompatible, he said. The Linux kernel will stick with GPLv2 for the foreseeable future, Bottomley said. Previously, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds has objected to GPLv3 because of concerns that digital rights management stipulations in the new license would be burdensome. The Free Software Foundation did not provide a response to Bottomley's claims on Thursday. The founder and president of the foundation, Richard Stallman, has advocated migrations to the new GPLv3 license for free software, emphasizing improvements in such areas as digital rights management and patent protection. Microsoft posted a statement on its Web site Thursday that said the company is not a party to GPLv3 and that none of the company's actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of the license. The company also said it assumes no legal obligations under GPLv3. "While there have been some claims that Microsoftâs distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law," Microsoft said. "In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future," Microsoft said. Under a multifaceted agreement with Novell, both companies agreed to not sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues; Microsoft through the arrangement can sell Novell subscription certificates for Suse Linux. Microsoft has decided the support certificates will not entitle the recipient to receive support or updates relating to code licensed under GPLv3. The full statement can be found here.
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Microsoft shot back at the open source community Thursday, saying it would not provide support for software licensed under the GPLv3. The third version of the GPL was officially launched a week ago by the Free Software Foundation.
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Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco's community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.
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Simple tool for mass-renaming of files, download of episode lists from TV.com, TVRage or AniDB, analyzing a folder (number of files and total size for each file type), creating and checking of SFV files all in a single executable jar.   What's new in FileBot 1.6: * Episode list searches work much better now (AniDB works again) * Much better handling of lots of files when creating/check sfv files * DnD improvements * Lots of bugfixes
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I'm looking for ideas, established practices, do's and don'ts for sponsoring an open source project.  An upfront caveat -- this is not an actual offer. It's totally hypothetical. If I make the offer it will be done in some other more formal way.  The project: I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux. I don't want to hire someone to do this project, rather I want to offer a reward when the project is completed.  The source code is already released under the GPL, in versions for Mac OS X and Windows. Of course Mac OS is a flavor of Unix, but the internal API is quite different, I imagine, from Linux. I'm not looking for elegance, I'm looking for functionality. I don't care how the port is done, just that it be maintainable, and then be released (of course) under the GPL.  Personally, I think the most likely way to get this done quickly is to compile the code under WINE, using the Windows version of the code, and then go back and connect up the Unix system calls, so that all the Unix related verbs work. (Note the OPML Editor is actually a rich programming environment, despite its diminutive name. It's an instance of UserLand Frontier, which goes back to 1988.) To me, it would be worth $10,000 to have the OPML Editor running reliably on Linux, because then all the projects I've built and am building would then automatically run on Linux. Now I'm not saying that the project can be done for that amount of money (it's possible that it can), but I also don't feel I should be the only person funding the project. And maybe it's enough of a prize to incentivize someone or a group to do it. Now, of course, I see problems. Since it's an open source project, how will I know who to give the reward to if the goal is met. It might be the result of the work of a group of people. If so, I think they would have to figure out among themselves how to split the reward. On the other hand, I don't see any movement right now to port the codebase to Linux, so maybe if someone is interested in the project, you should do it on your own, and just present the results. If it works, then it seems you would be entitled to the reward. I seem to remember people proposing groupware systems for creating these kinds of projects, a few years ago. Not sure if they came to fruition, for all I know there could be an eBay for open source programming projects. If you have any information to share on this, please post a comment here, and thanks in advance.
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Developing mapping software? Autodesk plans to release a handy coordinate conversion tool as open-source software.
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The Free Software Foundation's general counsel says the controversy over the Microsoft- Novell deal has complicated the completion of General Public License version 3, or GPLv3, which will be used to govern rights to thousands of open-source computer programs created by software developers around the globe.
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New PostScript RIP gives designers more options in output formats.
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Linux distributor TurboLinux is helping to translate docs from Open XML to ODF for Asian markets.
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XML Copy Editor is a fast, free, validating XML editor.   Version 1.1.0.6 introduces full Aspell support and XML Schema-based element inspection.  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=141776
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A quick post from janschneider.de talks about questions regarding the PHP5 compatibility of Horde, IMP, or other applications on the Horde mailing list
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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Ziff Davis - After 13 years, the Free Software Foundation will update the GPL, and the to-do list is a long one.
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Latest PEAR Releases:MDB2_Schema 0.8.0File_Bittorrent 2.0.0b1File_Bittorrent2 1.0.0RC1XML_Query2XML 1.3.0
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Sviluppa sistemi alimentazione alternativi a Gpl e metano