Free Republic

GPLv3 will help FreeBSD take some users away from Linux, according to the founder and vice president of The FreeBSD Foundation. Writing in the FreeBSD Foundation's August newsletter, Justin T. Gibbs said "GPLv3 is a critical concern for many current commercial users of open source software. "Against the backdrop of GPLv3, the stark difference between the BSD licensing philosophy and that of the Free Software Foundation are only too clear," he said. One difference Gibbs saw was future-proofing the licences. "A GPL proponent might argue that a licence for free software must be upgraded periodically since we cannot anticipate what...

How hypervisors can defeat GPLv3's "anti-tivoization" Aug. 27, 2007 This guest whitepaper explains how hypervisors can isolate proprietary software from GPLv2 and GPLv3-licensed software. Authored by a Trango product manager, it uses Trango's hypervisor as an example, showing how the technology could help safeguard copyright-encumbered multimedia content in a video playback device with a user-modifiable Linux OS component. Spread the word:digg this story The paper was written by Bruno Zoppis, a former Sun Microsystems software engineer who now manages products for Trango. Alongside Trango's "Virtual Processors" technology, Zoppis appears to consider products from VMWare, IBM, and Sun Microsystems as falling...

This guest whitepaper explains how hypervisors can isolate proprietary software from GPLv2 and GPLv3-licensed software. Authored by a Trango product manager, it uses Trango's hypervisor as an example, showing how the technology could help safeguard copyright-encumbered multimedia content in a video playback device with a user-modifiable Linux OS component.The paper was written by Bruno Zoppis, a former Sun Microsystems software engineer who now manages products for Trango. Alongside Trango's "Virtual Processors" technology, Zoppis appears to consider products from VMWare, IBM, and Sun Microsystems as falling into the "hypervisor" product category. Zoppis begins with an introduction to GPL licensing, including the...

When it comes to open sourcing Solaris and Java, patents and politics are leading Sun toward a change of heart. The question is which open source licence should govern the building of projects out of the company's technology crown jewels. The open source Solaris project began with a Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL), and open source Java employs version 2 of the General Public License (GPL). Now, though, Sun likes the idea of governing both projects with the upcoming GPL version 3, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said in a speech and an interview at the company's analyst summit in...

Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart. The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world's most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo video recorders and other gadgets. But while Torvalds has been...