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Domain: hecker.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to hecker.org.

Stories · 2

  1. On the Various Flavors of Open Source Licences...

    Ask · News · · posted by Cliff · from the stuff-to-think-about dept. · 3 comments
    Icebox asks: "With the increasing number of for-profit software vendors releasing their products as open source I am beginning to concern myself more and more with licensing. Many of these vendors choose to write their own licenses rather than release under something that is already out there. After following the Qt announcement and reading statements like "the Qt license was incompatible with the GPL" (from RMS and others) I would like to research the subject on my own. This question came up on Slashdot before, but that was prior to the flood of new licenses. I even found this which seems like a good analysis of what should be the aim of OSS licenses. Does anyone know of a good source for legal precedents for any of the open licenses? (if there are any) How about a comparison of the various licenses from a legal perspective? This would seem to be a necessity if anyone plans to combine code from GPL, IPL, LGPL, BSD, NPL, etc.."

  2. How To Best Manage Open Source Projects?

    Ask · Programming · · posted by Cliff · from the stuff-to-read dept. · 73 comments
    This member, from the voiciferous Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "I work for a fairly large company, and I'm trying to convice the senior management to open source a piece of internally developed software that we rely upon, but that we don't directly profit from. This software enables our business model, but the software itself doesn't offer any particular competitive advantage. (Actually, to be a little more accurate, we would like to develop a system that replaces a commercial off-the-shelf solution that we're less than happy with, and open source that, so if you have anecdotal evidence or other ammunition for that particular argument, I'd be glad to hear it)." And this is something that I think more businesses should look into doing. If you use a piece of software that your business doesn't depend on, commercially, why not free it? (Read more...)

    "What I'm really looking for is advice on how to make the project successful as an open source intiative. Specific issues include, but aren't limited to:

    • Where/how should we host the project? Something internal? Something like SourceForge?
    • What management structures/tools are helpful? At minimum we'll need a source-code repository and a mailinglist/newsgroup, right? Anything else considered critical?
    • What are some effective control stuctures? Who should determine what makes it into an official release? By what procedure? Who should be able to add code to the tree? What kinds of resources do we need to commit to this project to make it effective?

    In short, what advice do you have on the mechanics and management of open source projects?

    I'm familiar with the standard technical and business arguments for open source software (including:

    and others), and feel I can articulate them pretty clearly, but that's not really what my question is about."