Dear Minister Roberto Bizzo, on 25 May 2010 the regional government authority of Bolzano decided to spend 2.2 million EUR over the next three years to renew software licenses from Microsoft Ireland, and to buy additional licenses. All this was done without a public call for tender, making it impossible for competing suppliers of similar software to make offers of their own.

"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.

In the last 24 hours I implemented Licenses validation, whitelisting, masking and database support to Entropy. When I started, I tried to find out if someone (maybe crazy like me?) had already made a list of free (as in freedom and/or beer) software licenses. I didn’t dig too much and decided to have a look at /usr/portage/licenses. OMG, 811 licenses to read!

"...In the GNU Project we usually recommend people use copyleft licenses like GNU GPL, rather than permissive non-copyleft free software licenses. We don't argue harshly against the non-copyleft licenses—in fact, we occasionally recommend them in special circumstances—but the advocates of those licenses show a pattern of arguing harshly against the GPL..."

Simon Phipps proposes a hard problem: expanding the definition of "open source" to include patents.

The easy part is dealing with any patents that are actually licensable by the person or company who is licensing the code. To get to a new "definition" you could say that copyright licenses that don't also grant a patent license must be accompanied by a patent license grant.

What's the point of GPLv2 libraries? What's the purpose of libraries associated with licenses anyway? Do they provide useful guidance or impose annoying restrictions? Who wants to puzzle out the legalese of licenses and their appurtenances when working with code and systems that are supposed to be open?

I’ve been reading a lot of articles this weekend. I stumbled upon one called “Do Open Source Licenses Have a Purpose?” which is to be honest a rhetorical question. Ken Hess on Daniweb actually suggests we should throw away our 64 different license CHOICES and just give away our code public domain.

I would be happy to see one of two courses of action. Either: (a) Change the licenses to make an exception for running on Windows - namely that it is not permitted. (b) Change the licenses so that only the original author may port their own software to Windows - as proprietary only!

Open Source is not about freedom, nor is it about licenses. It's about community. Of course everyone knows about Richard Stallman's concern about having the freedom to modify all software on his machine. Tim O'Reilly has had a concern for many years that Open Source licenses do not keep software Open Source when it is not being distributed but instead performed as in Web 2.0 applications.