"We’ve just added the seal you see at right to Creative Commons licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. Public domain is not a license, but is an acceptable copyright status for free cultural works according to the Definition.

"So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge [...] In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses.

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all?

Now anybody who's ever been in the tech world has likely heard of free software licenses such as the ever famous GPL, as well as other open source licensing systems. But far fewer have heard of Creative Commons.

Serena Software is licensing its Business Mashups software under Creative Commons licenses. Under the program, Serena will license 13 pre-built Business Mashups and will do so with others that the company builds in the future. Business Mashups serve as graphical representations of simple business processes, such as vacation requests and sales discount approvals. Key quote: "Because they're graphics, you can't use traditional software licensing rules."

FreeCulture.org (Students for Free Culture) has just published a thorough and detailed post calling for the retirement of the non-free clauses, NoDerivatives (ND) and NonCommercial (NC).

Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task.

How does License Proliferation effect medical software and what can we do about it? How to choose a license for your medical software project? What are the implications for the medical FOSS community of various software licenses? This is intended to be a complete guide to free and open source software licensing for medical software. Please comment on how I can make it better.

"I attended an interesting talk by James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center earlier this week. The discussion focused on how the Free Software movement can now be regarded as a success and how others are now attempting to replicate this in other areas such as media (Creative Commons).