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
How to do Sociotechnical Design Using Domain-Driven Design and Change Smuggling
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can upskill sociotechnical design to navigate organizational dynamics and decision complexity in human systems. Change smuggling offers a practical way to launch small, safe-to-fail probes, nudging sociotechnical changes to emerge organically and conversationally.
By Ben LindersCrossplane Reaches Production Maturity by Graduating CNCF
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has graduated Crossplane, marking a major milestone for the open-source project that turns Kubernetes into a universal control plane for cloud infrastructure. For practitioners, it signals that Crossplane is no longer an experimental idea but a production-hardened foundation for building internal platforms.
By Matt FosterRunning Java on iOS: Gluon Introduces OpenJDK Mobile Resources and Automated Build Pipelines
OpenJDK is now able to build and run on iOS (and Android) as a native binary, opening the way to run unmodified Java code on mobile.
By Ben EvansKubeCon NA 2025 - Salesforce’s Approach to Self-Healing Using AIOps and Agentic AI
AIOps and Agentic AI technologies can help in developing solutions to intelligently analyze Kubernetes cluster health, automatically diagnose problems, and orchestrate issue resolutions with minimal human intervention. Vikram Venkataraman and Srikanth Rajan spoke at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 Conference about Salesforce’s approach to self-healing systems using AIOps and AI Agents.
By Srini PenchikalaPresentation: Productivity Is Messing Around and Having Fun
Holly Cummins & Trisha Gee explain how to achieve the "Double Win" - boosting both developer joy and productivity. They expose the flaws of traditional metrics, identify sources of developer toil (slow builds, flaky tests), and share methods and techniques (like boredom and play) for engineering leaders and architects to unlock creativity and a 31% boost in positive-brain productivity.
By Holly Cummins, Trisha Gee
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown