There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too.

Today I ran across another open-source Kickstarter project that I thought was worth sharing. The project, called Debate OS, is an Ubuntu spin focused on providing a debate environment for high school and college students.

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

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 Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated.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?

As the industry grows there are a select group of business leaders that are making the industry what it is today and will be responsible for the direction and success of the industry going forward. Here are the open source business leaders who matter the most as 2008 begins.

There is a discussion going on at SugarCRM's forum page, "Why the Sugar license is mad, bad and may be dangerous" -- part of a much larger discussion that Matt Aslett captures well in this article on the current state of such non-OSI-approved licenses -- that reminded me that I've been meaning to explain something to you about trademarks.

Any old standards hand forced to choose the single most disputed issue in standard setting over the past decade would likely respond with a deceivingly simple question: "What does it mean to be an 'open standard?'" A similar debate rages in the open source community between those that believe that some licenses (e.g., the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses) are "open enough," while others would respond

Coverity Open Source Strategist David Maxwell Joins Open Source Licensing Debate with Eclipse Foundation and Alfresco

The concept of open source software seems so firmly entrenched in higher education that it comes as almost a shock to realize there's actually a debate over it.