Codetown
Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Some thoughts on licensing from Google's Chris DiBona
Chris DiBona is the director of open source at Google, and he's been taking a big part in the open source and Free software ecosystem for a very long time--not least in his role with Google's Summer of Code. He recently posted on Twitter what he calls "a little rant" about software licensing -- well worth reading the whole (short!) thing.
Upshot: Be cautious and humble in selecting a software license; ones that have been around and used happily by others have advantages, including familiarity to users. This applies to open source licenses, but maybe not so surprisingly at least as much to licenses that offer some of the qualities of open source (availability of code) without all the freedoms that FOSS developers have come to expect.
New licenses, especially ones with complex restrictions on use, can make users shy away from them.
Comment
Happy 10th year, JCertif!
Notes
Welcome to Codetown!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Looking for Jobs or Staff?
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
InfoQ Reading List
Shaping an Impactful Data Product Strategy
Lior Barak and Gaëlle Seret advocate proactive, business-focused strategies for data engineering. Barak proposes a 3-year roadmap using his Data Ecosystem Vision Board to align teams on strategic capabilities and measure ROI, cost, and impact. Seret promotes a "data as a product" approach, co-creating visions with stakeholders and evolving shared taxonomies to ensure long-term alignment.
By Rafiq GemmailHuatuoGPT-o1: Advancing Complex Medical Reasoning with AI
Researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data have introduced HuatuoGPT-o1, a medical large language model (LLM) designed to improve reasoning in complex healthcare scenarios.
By Robert KrzaczyńskiPresentation: Where is the Art? A History in Technology
Andy Piper discusses creative technology and art and the ways in which it has been misunderstood and feared at different points in our shared history and culture.
By Andy PiperGoogle Releases PaliGemma 2 Vision-Language Model Family
Google DeepMind released PaliGemma 2, a family of vision-language models (VLM). PaliGemma 2 is available in three different sizes and three input image resolutions and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several vision-language benchmarks.
By Anthony AlfordNvidia Announces Arm-Powered Project Digits, Its First Personal AI Computer
Capable of running 200B-parameter models, Nvidia Project Digits packs the new Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell chip to allow developers to fine-tune and run AI models on their local machines. Starting at $3,000, Project Digits targets AI researchers, data scientists, and students to allow them to create their models using a desktop system and then deploy them on cloud or data center infrastructure.
By Sergio De Simone
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown