Archive for category OSS
GPL Round 1: FSF vs Cisco
Posted by brendanlawlor in Business & Technology, OSS on January 7, 2009
It’s hard to believe it, but despite the fact that the FSF has been around for more than 20 years, their recently filed suit against Cisco is the very first time that they will test their ability to uphold their copyright under GPL and LGPL in a court of law.
The Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard Stallman, is the copyright holder for a number of software modules including GCC and the Gnu C Library. These modules are at the centre of a long-standing disagreement between the FSF and Cisco. After 5 years of working with Cisco to ‘help’ them towards compliance, Stallman and Co. have finally spat the dummy and called in the lawyers.
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Drink OSS Responsibly
Posted by brendanlawlor in Agile, Business & Technology, Infrastructure, OSS on December 7, 2008
Here in DSI, we use a lot of great Open Source Software libraries and tools. Choosing the right ones, and aligning them with our development approaches, helps to boost our productivity and quality. The same realisation has spurred just about every other software development company on the planet, and as a result OSS has really brewed up a storm. But now that the initial euphoria has passed, it’s time to stop and take stock of the situation. There’s another storm brewing, and it’s going to do a lot of damage to those who don’t see it coming.
Maven2: The Devil You Know
Posted by brendanlawlor in Agile, Architecture, Infrastructure, Java, OSS on October 17, 2008
Maven is great, isn’t it? You just install it, download your favourite OSS project, type in mvn install and your jar file comes out the other end. Magic. It gets you thinking: Building should always be this easy, right? Your company should be using Maven to manage all its builds. Push-button builds could be just one download away. Right?
Think again.
Now It’s TheirSQL
Posted by yagizerkan in Business & Technology, IT, OSS on January 17, 2008
If you haven’t heard about it yet, [tag]Sun[/tag] bought [tag]MySQL[/tag]. And this, for $1 billion. Wow! Even with the weakening dollar, it’s a lot of money (to be precise it’s $800 million in cash and $200 million worth of options).
We heard the news yesterday when John, Des and I were at the [tag]Spring eXchange[/tag] 2008. [tag]Oracle[/tag]‘s buying [tag]BEA[/tag] didn’t come as a surprise. However I wasn’t aware that Sun was planning to buy MySQL. We’ll see if Sun’s relations with Oracle will remain good after this 
.
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