Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative (and Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs), has decided to stand up against the flagrant abuse of the term "open source" (by companies like SugarCRM, CentricCRM, and MuleSource, and OpenBravo, to shame a few). He is urging the community to use "open source" only to refer to OSI-approved licenses.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

"The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you're a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them."

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 Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated.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

HP is among the biggest backers of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the world. As such they've developed their own best practices and tools to help their customers understand what Open Source licenses their applications contain as well as helping to maintain compliance with the terms of the various licenses.

Sometimes being the open source software leader means distancing yourself from open source claims.

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.

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.

This was the body of an email message sent to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-discuss email list less than two hours after the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was officially announced by the Free Software Foundation (FSF): "I submit the following licenses for consideration by the OSI for inclusion in the list of licenses complying with the OSD."