license

Last week the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in the European Union on matters of EU law, issued a judgment in the case of SAS Institute Inc. v. World Programming Ltd, C-406/10, which was referred to the court for a preliminary ruling by the UK's High Court of Justice for England and Wales, Chancery Division. » Read more

The recent release of the Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office has been interesting and encouraging, even if it did stir in me a certain scepticism that things will be different this time round. Under both Labour and Conservative administrations, the Cabinet Office has been tasked with increasing the adoption of open source by government departments, and each time a fine statement has been made that has resulted in very little change. » Read more

After you vote, tell us why you use the license you do in the comments below.

As of noon Eastern time today, you can put a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0) on your YouTube video uploads. In addition, YouTube will be uploading plenty of Creative Commons content to its editor tool to get you started.

Through the site's year-old video editor tool's new Creative Commons tab, you'll get more than 10,000 videos from sources like PublicResource.org, C-SPAN, and Al Jazeera to use in your projects. And of course, you can also post whatever you've created from scratch with the CC BY license. » Read more

As I wrote previously concerning indemnity, I constantly encounter both governments and companies claiming they have policies permitting or even favouring open source software. Yet there's still a huge amount of proprietary software being procured by them. » Read more

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet Molly Dix and Jeff Cope, who run the Open Innovation Advisory Services group at RTI. For those not familiar with RTI, it is one of the world's preeminent research institutes, founded by a group of scientists in 1958 and now employing almost 3000 people helping businesses and governments in more than 40 countries around the world. » Read more

I had the opportunity to participate as a speaker in the first Open Your World forum.  My presentation, "Open Source License Compliance", was an adaptation of a talk I've previously given to lawyers with varying levels of experience in the legal issues surrounding open source software.  It is always challenging to speak on this sort of subject when you aren't sure who your audience is, and I worried that the topic may have seemed relatively dry.  Nevertheless, I believe it is worthwhile to accompany discussions of applying open source principles to a wide range of non-technic » Read more

A little over a month ago, the Fedora Project announced a plan to replace the existing Fedora Individual Contributor License Agreement (FICLA) with something new, which we've imaginatively titled the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA). After gathering some feedback on the first draft from the Fedora community, the Fedora Project published a revised draft. » Read more

Last week we published an updated version of our participation section. We wrote a short post a few weeks ago about how we could make contributing to opensource.com an easier and more transaprent process. In the spirit of release early and often, the next version is now available.

If you want to write an article for opensource.com, design an image for illustration, or take a more active role as a commenter or contributor, we've compiled some info on all of these items.

You can find them in different areas around the site or at our participate link in the header. Here is the list of what's been updated: » Read more

Users of free and open source software (“FOSS”) have little to gain and much to fear from the patent system. The patent system poses two major threats to users: First, the software itself can be burdened or extinguished altogether by “software patents', that is, claims over basic techniques used in computer programs or common features of programs. Second, the use of computers to perform basic business functions traditionally performed in other ways, can be monopolized as a result of patents on computer enabled “business methods”. » Read more