licensing

Simplify Creative Commons, don't tweak it

As part of a study of how people understand the term "noncommercial use," Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito is conducting a poll linked to from his blog.

It's certainly a problematic restriction, as things stand. Unfortunately, Creative Commons appears to be going down the path of merely defining it more crisply when, in my view, the better approach would be simply to eliminate it entirely.

First, a little background. Creative Commons licenses are a sort of counterpart to open-source software licenses that is intended to apply to things like books, videos, photographs, and so forth. There are … Read more

LinkedIn and MySpace upgrade search with open-source Lucene

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.

Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.

Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, … Read more

HP settles inkjet dispute with LexJet

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday announced it has dropped a patent infringement charge against LexJet Corporation over the type of ink used in remanufactured HP print cartridges.

In exchange, LexJet has agreed to alter the recipe used to make its ink as well as pay HP an undisclosed sum.

HP originally filed suit against Florida-based LexJet on May 22.

LexJet is one of many companies that take used HP ink cartridges and resell them with their own ink inside. It's a sensitive topic for HP, one of the world's largest producer of printers and ink cartridges, which has sued several … Read more

Microsoft's licensing cripples its relevance to the Amazon cloud

Could Microsoft's proprietary licensing end up hurting it in the cloud?

That's the question asked on the Cloud Avenue blog, and the answer seems to be a clear "yes." Whatever the benefit to Microsoft in a desktop and server world, proprietary licensing stands to hobble its attempts to be widely relevant in the cloud or, at least, in Amazon.com's EC2 cloud.

Why? Because Microsoft's proprietary licensing ensures it can't be a viable player in Amazon's newly announced Paid AMI (Amazon Machine Image) Support marketplace. The program allows users to "share … Read more

The license wars are over

If the license wars aren't over, they've certainly muted.

The adoption of the new version of the General Public License, used by Linux and many other open-source projects, was a long, loud, and contentious process. But after all the sturm und drang, it's not clear to me what real impact GPL 3 will have.

Depending on whom you ask, clauses concerning ideological sticking points such as digital rights management were either narrowed in scope or defanged almost completely. And it seems entirely possible that Linux, perhaps the best-known open-source project licensed under the GPL, may never move … Read more

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Microsoft: We're all 'mixed source' companies

In case you were wondering, Microsoft thinks the battle of open source vs. proprietary software is basically over.

"Today, but increasingly in the future, we are all going to be 'mixed source'," Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said in a lunchtime interview on Thursday. To bolster his claim, Horacio Gutierrez notes Microsoft is releasing plenty of stuff as open source, while open-source companies like Red Hat often license commercial software alongside their open-source products. "I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past," he said.

That doesn't … Read more

HP's inkjet tech to be used for in-home dialysis treatment

Inkjet technology isn't just for printers.

Hewlett-Packard has agreed to license its patent on inkjet for use in a treatment system for people suffering kidney failure, according to HP's director of IP licensing, Charlie Chapman.

Sure, the two might sound completely unrelated, but HP's done something similar before: last year, another medical services company licensed inkjet intellectual property to administer vaccines.

But this time, HP will allow Home Dialysis Plus, a new company still gathering funding, to use HP's "fluid management" technology used in inkjet printers.

HP uses it to create calculated mixtures of … Read more

AMD deal triggers Intel license warning

Update on October 9 at 9:00 a.m. with additional comments from Intel and AMD.

Advanced Micro Device's new manufacturing venture may come with some old baggage.

After AMD announced on Tuesday that it would spin off its manufacturing assets to a new company partially owned by the Abu Dhabi government, Intel was quick to warn AMD about patent and cross-licensing concerns.

AMD will own part of the new manufacturing entity, for the time being to be called The Foundry Company, while Advanced Technology Investment Co. (ATIC) will own the rest (55.6 percent) and have equal voting … Read more