The Red Herring of Open Source Licensing
There has been a lot of drum beating of late on the topic of the increasing irrelevance of Open Source licensing, & the loudest drummers seem to be Tim O'Reilly & Matt Asay . Matt's recent blog post touches on some great points in this discussion, not the least of which is: "The real value in open-source software is no longer the software, but rather the resultant services that are delivered over the Web" This is spot on, and we (the industry) need to move beyond the 'licensing hiccup' that seems to permeate every conversation we have around Open Source (especially in government & enterprise). While I'll preface my statements with the standard disclaimer of ' IANAL ', for 'community source', or ' innersourcing ' discussions, I think that everyone gets way too wound around the axle on what the license is, and the relative merits of each possible alternative. I completely agree with Matt's point about the licenses ...