Once upon a time I was going to be a lawyer. One reason I didn’t go that way was to avoid running down rabbit holes like the one our own Jason Perlow offered us Thursday. (This puzzle called Down the Rabbit Hole is now on sale over at Legendary Toys.) Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t ...

Continuing its effort to get by with a little help from its friends, Nokia released a new version of its Qt user interface framework and Qt Creator, an integrated development environment (IDE). The new software is offered under the Lesser GPL for the first time, as well as the main GPL and two comme...

I have been wracking my brain all day for an angle on this Apple-Psystar story (great work by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) and I can’t come up with one. Save this. Open source should be supporting Apple here. Think about it. What is at the heart of open source? Contracts. The BSD and GPL licenses a...

After a three-year incubation period Sun’s long promised OpenSolaris, the third open source variant of Unix, was officially delivered Monday.  “It’s the first Opensolaris operating system that’s fully supported,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing for...

Before most of us had heard of FOSS there was shareware. (Image close up from Appistry.) Shareware was distributed free, often on floppy disks (ask your dad what they were). You could use it but you were expected to pay for it if you liked it. Business models differed. Some shareware locked up if yo...

Microsoft General Counsel and IP chief Brad Smith got a round of applause at the Open Source Business Conference Monday for showing respect to the open source community — but he faced some tough questioning from those in the bazaar. One attendee asked how Microsoft could collaborate with an in...

Open Source Initiative co-founder Bruce Perens wants back on the board. Perens, who quit OSI in 1999 to concentrate on free software, has launched a petition drive to win his way back in. Perens says vendors are over-represented on the board, which is headed by Michael Tiemann of Red Hat (above). &#...

I screwed up yesterday. (Picture from Boycott Novell.) After re-reading my piece, your comments, and the terms of both GPL licenses carefully, it’s clear to me I underestimated how easy it is for enterprises to violate its terms. But it’s not impossible. Far from it. I do think the folks...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds blasted patent trollers, Microsoft, Sun and the virtualization craze in his second official communiqué to the public. And he said desktop Linux is going nowhere in market share. In a second Q&A podcast posted on the Linux Foundation site, Torvalds told his intervie...

Some prominent bloggers have recently asked the question “Why don’t people care about freedom 0?� To me this just raises the question “What is this freedom 0 stuff anyway?� Herewith the (lengthy) results of my own attempts to find out the answers to both of these questions, and even raise ...