Writing
Tagged “licensing”
7 articles
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Software You Rent vs. Software You Own
Commercial software was never really yours, and the last pretense of ownership is going away. Broadcom's VMware is the loudest example, not the only one. What renting costs, what owning actually takes, and how to tell…
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When the Cathedral Ate the Bazaar: How Corporate Power Consumed Open Source
Eric Raymond predicted the open bazaar would beat the corporate cathedral. For a while it did. Then the cathedral bought the stalls. How acquisitions, license changes and platform lock-in reshaped open source, what the…
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From Licenses to Liberation
I started out on Banyan VINES, NetWare and Windows NT, and came to Linux in 1996 to get out of a licensing problem. A look back at how Linux grew from a workaround into the thing everything runs on, what's still weak…
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Repercussions of Closed Sourcing in Open Source Realms
Last week Elastic, which closed its license in 2021, added an open source one back. Three years of relicensing by MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, Redis and now CockroachDB have produced enough evidence to judge the…
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Understanding Open Source Licensing
Open source licenses are short, readable and enforceable, and companies still get them wrong. What the main licenses actually require, what triggers those requirements, and the court cases that proved the GPL has teeth…
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The History of Open Source
Software started out free because nobody thought to sell it. Then it became property, then a movement fought to make it free again, and then the movement won so thoroughly that the companies it fought now run on it. A…
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Open Source: Free as in Freedom
Open source was never about the price. It's a short list of rights, and this year a growing number of companies want the reputation without granting them. What the freedoms actually are, how free software and open…