This is a guest post from Jim Farmer, Chairman of Instructional Media + Magic Inc. Jim has also written a series of feature articles on open source for Informa’s London-based Intellectual Property Magazine. Higher education has traditionally been a knowledge “sharing” environment. Early software was exchanged without license and, in practice, without restrictions. As the monetization … Read more
[UPDATE 04/06/13] Since this blog post was written, the trademark for Koha in New Zealand has been granted to HLT. See Chris’s comment below. Earlier in the year, I wrote a case study on Koha, the open source library management system released under the GPL, detailing the history of the project and how the sale … Read more
You need sound coding skills to create good software, but the success of an open source project can also depend on something much less glamorous: your choice of software license. Last week I spoke to Paul Rubens of CIO.com about the issues that need to be considered when deciding which licence to use when releasing … Read more
Last week I took the opportunity to visit Oxford’s Hackspace and see a talk by Javier Serrano of CERN. Serrano has been working together with Moorcrofts, an Oxford-based legal firm, on the latest version of CERN’s Open Hardware Licence (OHL). CERN’s systems have unique requirements in terms of scale, synchronisation and geographic distribution. As a … Read more
tl;dr: no. Creative Commons is a great way to license documentation, websites, articles, artwork, and other media assets associated with a software projects, but source code has some special characteristics that are better suited to using licenses recommended by the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. To find out why, take a look … Read more
Even for those of us who find smartphone patent litigation interesting, the sheer number of decisions and reversals across so many countries can be hard to track. The general impression one gains is that every major player is seeking to gain a stake in the profits of every other major player by winning patent litigation … Read more
When I was a poor student I was extremely grateful that the local bookshop had both a new and a second hand section. Text books were and are expensive, and I would always check the used section for a usable if dog-eared copy of whatever text I was seeking. At the end of each term … Read more
In an earlier post Mark Johnson responded to recent commentary about unlicensed code on Github. Mark criticised the idea put forward by some pundits that developers not licensing their software project was some kind of movement. Instead Mark sees it as emerging from a lack of education (or, quite possibly, sheer laziness). He also reiterated the point that … Read more
One of the hot topics of commentary on open source development at the moment is the licensing situation on GitHub. When code is committed to GitHub, the copyright owner (usually the author or their employer) retains all rights to the code, and anyone wishing to re-use the code (by downloading it, or by “forking” and … Read more
Almost any software project involves working with dependencies – from single-purpose libraries to complete frameworks. When you’re working on a project it’s tempting to bring in libraries, focus on meeting the user need, and figure out the niceties later. However, a little thought early on can go a long way. This is because every dependency … Read more