Open Source Daily Journal

The License Review Process:

The ultimate goal of the OSI License Review Process is to guarantee that licenses and software labeled as “open source” adapts to existing community norms and expectations. For that reason, all licenses must go through a public review process described below. The OSI Board is glad to consult with entities in advance to help them navigate the process and improve their license, but formal approval requires going through license-review.

Purpose of the Process:

• Guarantee approved licenses compliesto the Open Source Definition
• Identify appropriate License Proliferation Category
• Disapprove vanity and duplicative Licenses
• Ensure a thorough, transparent, and timely review (e.g., within 60 days)
• Provide current status of license review request.

(Source:Opensource.org)

Criteria:

1. No Intentional Secrets

2. Availability

3. Patents

4. No Agreements

5. No OSR Incompatible Dependencies

(Source:Opensource.org)

The ultimate purpose of an open standard is to increase the market for a technology by having potential consumers or suppliers of that technology to spend in it without having to either pay monopoly rent or fear litigation on trade secret, copyright, patent, or trademark causes of action. No such standard can properly be described as “open” except to the extent it achieves these goals. The industry has learned by previous experiences that the only software-related standards to fully meet these goals are those which not only permit but encourage open-source implementations. Open-source implementations are a quality and honesty check for any open standard that might be applied in software; whether an application programming interface, a hardware interface, a file format, a communication protocol, a specification of user interactions, or any other form of data interchange and program control. To support industry participants (suppliers, consumers, and regulators) identify and specify standards that permit open source implementations, the OSI has specified a minimal Open Standards Requirement (OSR). The OSI has also made a set of Criteria that can be used to judge whether a standard fully abides with that Requirement.

(Source:Opensource.org)

1. Fedora 9

2. Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.0

3. Ubuntu 8.04

4. Picasa 2.7

(Source:Lxer.com)

The FOSSology project by HP is geared towards analyzing open source programs in order to determine under what licenses the various pieces of codes can be classified under. The main thrust of the project is anchored on the premise that although a certain application software like the GPL for example may be classified under a particular license, some of the underlying codes can be potentially classified with other licenses. HP intends to assemble an active contributor�s base by providing the gateway to the open source community in to assist in developing additional features to achieve a valuable data mining tool to analyze software.

RSSOwl 2.0 is expected to be a major release in the world of open source applications. It contains lots of new and fun features that will surely provide its potential users with a great time working on RSS feeds. It was in summer 2005 when the idea of creating a new and improved RSSOwl was established. The main goal of the RSSOwl 2.0 is to provide a very powerful, user-friendly and easily upgradeable newsreader for everyone. The platform used to create RSSOwl 2.0 is the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and the database used is the bd4o for the storage of the news.