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Tag Archive for free-software

Give open-source developers a free license for my commercial software?

I am creating a software package that will be useful to programmers, engineers and scientists. List price will be in the region of $1,000 — way beyond the budget of most open-source developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts. So I am considering two things, the first generous, the second maybe a little greedy:

Is Java free/open source or not?

On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as free and open source software, (FOSS), under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of Java’s core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.

Anonymous software license

I am aware of some of the problems of the concept of “releasing a work to the public domain” (as mentioned here and here; I haven’t listened to this specific discussion yet). IANAL, but the main problems seem to be as follows:

Deferred Open Source licensing

Are there established models for releasing an initially proprietary piece of software under FLOSS conditions after a defined period or a certain point of time? The main problem here is that all parties involved must be able to trust that the Open Source licensing will actually take place at the defined time and no party can further defer or cancel this process.