A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement.

does California law allow a court to look at parol evidence in a contract dispute? That's a big part of what the parties argued about in appeals court in SCO v. Novell.

"...Now lets change our frame of reference to a ROA. In ROA, the most important part of the system is the data. Anything of interest gets a globally unique identifier, which is done via URIs.Next, the service becomes uninteresting because every service has the exact same API. On the Web, the service API is defined by HTTP verb's GET, POST, PUT, DELETE,..."

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the Artistic License really is a copyright license and not a contract.

If you’re a managed service provider or software as a service (SaaS) specialist, here’s an interesting theory: Instead of purchasing dozens — or hundreds — of x86 servers, you’re sometimes better off virtualizing your applications on a mainframe.

According to Swiss newspaper Neue Zuericher Zeitung, the Swiss government might be reconsidering its no-bid contract deal with Microsoft which has been opposed by a consortium of 18 open source vendors.

Consider the legal difference between purchasing a physical book and buying one for your Kindle. When you walk into your local Barnes & Noble to pick up a paperback of Animal Farm, the store doesn't force you to sign a contract limiting your rights.

"...So, the question of the day is how long service providers will be tolerated as open source vacuums. The Free Software Foundation avoided this issue with GPLv3 but has produced the Affero General Public License (AGPL) to cover the use of code that's delivered over a network, as opposed to on disk or by download as in the past.