Latest in Industry and Research Publications
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Stop maligning commercial open source, start helping it
You may have noticed how some open source enthusiasts are complaining about companies which relicensed their open source components to proprietary licenses. These companies get maligned using terms like “rug pull” and “bait and switch”, suggesting they were deliberately deceiving their users. I don’t want to speculate about the companies’ intentions, but I do want…
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The OPEN_Source-Initiative and the hyphen
Wikipedia is where linguists go when they are bored. So they long settled that it is “open source” (if used standalone) and “open-source software” (if open-source is a modifier/attribute to a noun). Now the Open Source Initiative found a linguist who argues there should be no hyphen at all. In my book, there is a…
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The prisoner’s dilemma of open-source software security (Koch, IEEE Computer)
I’m happy to report that the 31st article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. Title The prisoner’s dilemma of open-source software security Keywords Open Source Software, Security, Government Policies, Trust Management, Open Source, Open Source Software, Prisoners Dilemma, Government Agencies, Strategic Level, Defection, Testimony, Game Theory, Rational Choice, Effects Of…
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Free and open-source software [Computer Magazine]
I’m happy to report that the 30th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. With this article, I’m turning to open source fundamentals which I’ll write about if there is no other article in the queue. Please keep submitting article proposals! Title Free and Open-Source Software Keywords Open Source, Open…
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A plea for an open source cloud copyleft license
Is the AGPL-3.0 (or-later) license an effective cloud copyleft license? Does it do the trick of keeping community open source free and the competition away from commercial open source? I tried getting an answer to this question from the OSI’s license-discuss mailing list. Sadly, the answer appears to be: Probably not. Why do I care?…
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The societal value of commercial open source
The heat about recent relicensing in open source land has dissipated a bit. To recap in a nutshell what had people riled up: Venture-capital-backed startups increasingly went to market by providing their software product, in particular software infrastructure components, under an open source license (dual-licensing, next to their commercial license). Eventually, payday came, and they…