mercredi 30 mars 2005

Enfold Enterprise Server 1.2 released Interested in Plone, but on a Windows server? Interested in a commercially-supported version of Plone, with deep integration into Windows services (IIS, Index server, Active Directory, an NTFS-optimized DirectoryStorage, and more)? Interested in starting a relationship with some of the brightest Python-Windows people around? Enfold's lastest version of Plone for Windows is worth looking at. Well done, Enfold. It's a slick package the reflects a ton of strong engineering work. At their price point, it is a steal. And of course, there's Plone Desktop too, for client-side integration. 5:55:04 PM   comment []

Reducing license proliferation Intel just announced the decision to abandon their custom open source license. After "studying internally the issue of license proliferation", Intel decided "to have 'Intel Open Source License' (aka 'BSD License with Export Notice') removed from future use as an approved OSI open source license." HP responded with an unusually candid response: "I offer my sincere thanks to Intel Corp for this move. This is an awesome piece of leadership and I congratulate you for it." This is indeed an awesome piece of leadership. Intel is..uhh...big, with lots of shareholders and SEC regulations. In a previous CNet article, the OSI indicated a desire to improve collaboration by reducing the number of licenses. Computer Associates said they now regret the decision to have their own license: "If we had taken more counsel, we might have done things differently". License proliferation, as these two articles mention, has a cost. "It's confusing as hell to explain to customers," says Mike Olson. It "prevent[s] people from sharing code from different open-source projects." As this article states, there are over 50 OSI-approved licenses, most of which aren't used beyond one community. (I imagine that this criteria includes Python and Zope.) "There are a handful of popular open-source licenses, such as the General Public License (GPL)...and the Apache Software License" which, perhaps combined with one or two others, provide sufficient choice. Hopefully more projects will follow the leadership of Intel and others and start migrating to popular licenses. 10:45:44 AM   comment []