Sun Drafts New &quot;SCO-Sensitive&quot; Open Source License
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Without saying it has anything to do with its avowed determination to open source Solaris 10, Sun has sent over a newfangled open source license to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the keeper of such things, for its approval.
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Taking a leaf from Linux&#39;s book, Sun Microsystems will later today make its newly developed Solaris 10 operating system available for free, charging customers only for support.
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Having just emerged from a public beta process that began in the spring of 2005, and especially now that Java is an open-source project, developers will find little to be surprised about in Sun's newest Java SE 6, released yesterday. But one sign that even Java is adapting with the times is its new support for external scripting engines.
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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.
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Blog: The web and the desktop are increasingly blurring, as Adobe's Apollo project demonstrates.  Unfortunately, open source licensing remains in beta while we're about to go into production....
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A gut reaction to news that hackers broke into The SCO Group&#39;s Web site and mocked its claims to own parts of the Linux operating system might be a feeling that SCO brought it on itself by trying to constrain the open source movement through its legal
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At yesterday&#39;s official launch of the new Solaris 10 operating system in San Jose, Calif., Sun executives said Solaris will be issued next January under an &quot;open-source&quot; licensing plan similar to that used by the rival operating system Linux and the
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InfoWorld - Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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A series of security holes in three common Linux components has led open-source vendors to rush out several updates. Two of them, rated &quot;highly critical&quot; by security company Secunia, are in libpng, a library
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Ziff Davis - The Public Patent Foundation and others have serious questions about what Sun's new open-source patent policies will actually mean for developers.
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The FreeBSD Foundation and Sun Microsystems are negotiating a new license to continue distribution of binaries for the Java runtime and the JDK, for use with the FreeBSD open source operating system, according to the foundation.
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The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today announced the creation of a Open Source Software Licensing &amp; Legal education track at its upcoming Enterprise Linux
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(InfoWorld) - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed up Thursday evening at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and declared he would not answer questions about the GNU general public license version 3, but he did disclose his lifelong fantasy concerning open source licensing. The GPLv3, which is expected to be released at noon on Friday, has been the focus of a public exchange between Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds over the future of open source licensing and the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux. Schwartz, who briefly stopped to talk to reporters, said he wants licensing to be kept simple. "I want to get to uniform licenses for everything we do," Schwartz said. "So if you look at Sun you say 'Oh, I know you. I get you.'" Schwartz did not say which license he was considering. Sun has developed its own open source license, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Then he added, "One of my great fantasies in life is that the number of people with opinions on open source licenses will come roughly into balance with the number of people who have read them." "Go read the Mozilla license," he said. "It is very difficult for an international company to use it because it is for the [United States] only. What do I tell people in China? Sorry, if you have a gripe you need to come back to Santa Clara," he said with a laugh. Schwartz then took the stage and joked with the audience, thanking them for Sun's fourth-quarter revenue. He then talked about helping customers to condense their infrastructure by consolidating workloads, to run virtualized infrastructure at scale, and to develop compelling services. He singled out identity as one of those services. He then laid out Sun's position on open source software and licensing. "The core value of Sun comes down to a basic set of things," he said. "Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity." "We're every way thinking to combine the communities because we think that gives us the critical mass to go after the big opportunities in the marketplace." Shortly afterward Schwartz welcomed questions from the crowd, but added "just not about GPLv3, please." Earlier this month, Torvalds used the Linux Kernel Mailing List to slam Sun in responding to a post about Sun and open source licensing: "You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that Sun is in this to actually further some open source agenda." He then launched into a "cynical prediction" slamming Sun's licensing interests around the OpenSolaris kernel and GPLv3, and predicting Sun would use licensing to protect patents on its ZFS file system rather than make it freely and widely available to the open source community. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and kernel developers have said there is little chance the Linux community would move to the new GPLv3 because it is not significantly better than GPLv2 and could take six months or more to convert all the components of the kernel. "A GPLv3-only release [of the OpenSolaris kernel] would actually let [Sun] look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," Torvalds wrote. A day later, Schwartz responded on his blog in a friendly tone disputing Torvalds contention the Linux hurts Sun and saying Linux was not the enemy. Schwartz, writing on his blog, addresses Torvalds personally: "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense." Like the licensing, there also was no word Thursday night about dinner.
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Ziff Davis - With a relatively hostile environment that has pitted proprietary software against open source as a backdrop, the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GNU General Public License, is working on the first revamp to the license in 13 years.
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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.
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Like Linux code but better - grr By the end of this month Sun Microsystems will release the first developer version of OpenSolaris in its "Project Indiana" incarnation.â¦