Warning this article may contain opinions of the author that you and iTWire don't agree with.
Visit the last page to have your say in our forum.

No. 1 Story

Telstra adds one million mobile services, but Sensis plummets

Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.

read more

New GNU licence delayed

Opinion and Analysis

The GPL version 3 will take a few months more to come into effect. A March deadline has slipped and it is now looking like it may take until the final quarter of 2007 before the licence is formally ushered in.

A third discussion draft of the GPLv3 was released yesterday. The draft will be open for comment for a period of not less than two months; then a "last call draft" will be published and be open for 30 days. Assuming everything is in place, the licence will come into effect shortly thereafter.

One can gauge the extent to which the Microsoft-Novell deal has affected the free and open source software space when the delay is in the main attributed to that very deal.  

In an explanatory note issued a day before the release of the third discussion draft, the Free Software Foundation said: "The basic harm that such an agreement (the Novell deal) can do is to make the free software subject to it effectively proprietary. This result occurs to the extent that users feel compelled, by the threat of the patent, to get their copies in this way."

This is in reference to the portion of the agreement between Microsoft and Novell which specifies that neither company would sue the other's customers for patent violations.

"We take the threat seriously, and we have decided to act to block such threats, and to reduce their potential to do harm," the note said.

In the new draft, section 11 specifically deals with this problem and does not allow deals of this nature to be struck, deals that ensure that the distribution sold by one company is exempt from patent claims.



- sponsored feature -

The Death of Traditional BI: What’s Next?

How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business IP PABX BUYING GUIDE

Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more