As part of the migration from Plone to Wordpress and related pieces of software, the old mailing lists have been extracted from Plone and archived. Hereafter, mailing lists will be organised as follows:

ossg-committee@ossg.bcs.org

This list is used for discussing committee business. The archives are open but only committee members may join the list.

ossg-announcements@ossg.bcs.org

This is a low-traffic list used for OSSG event announcements. Posting is restricted to committee members.

ossg-members@ossg.bcs.org

A members discussion list, though we would prefer members to discuss issues using the blog comment pages.

The old mailing list archives may be found here:

Committee Forum

Committee discussion

Business

Discussion of issues surround business and open source.

Member Forum

Member event announcements

Licensing

Licensing discussion

eGovernment and Open Source

Discussion of Open Source in eGovernment

Knowledge Management and Open Source

Using open source for knowledge management

Agile Methods and Open Source

Relationship between Agile Methods and Open Source

Legal Issues surrounding Open Source

Discussion of legal issues involvng Open Source

Accessibility and Open Source

Discussion of Accessiblity in Open Source

Education and Open Source

Use of Open Source in Education

Apologies for any duplicate messages etc. The archives were produced by screen-scraping the old Plone site. Not ideal.

Just wanted to inform members of this group that the Open University is running a module on Open Source Technology; the next start date of the course …

if i have developed an open source software; am i allowed to write my own licence(one in which i have my own conditions). for instance, i might not agree with the wording of the various available formats of licences and would prefer to impose my own conditions on the users.
roohbir

Computer Weekly (2005,01 March p.12) reports on a row between leading Open Source Developers and standards organization OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). OASIS has recently changed its rules allowing developers the right to charge royalties for contributed code.

This has met with strong disapproval from leading members of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Community including Lawrence Rosen, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Mitchell Kapor, Lawrence Lessig, Doc Searls, Tim O’Reilly, and Eric Raymond. They have all signed an email letter - a copy of this is shown at http://osdir.com/Article4278.phtml - calling for OASIS to drop its plans and to boycott any of its standards that are not open.

More about OASIS can be found on its website at http://www.oasis-open.org/who/ which amongst other detail describes itself as a not-for-profit consortium that produces more web services standards than any other organization.

Lawrence Rosen has recently published a book entitled Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property. An online version is available at http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm published under the Academic Free Licence version 2.1.

Mark Elkins

I was looking at the state of OS Licences (IANAL)
and concluded that it would be useful to the
OS community if the BCS itself operated an OS Licence.

If it good enough for the The Regents of the University of California,
then why not for the BCS itself?

Advantages:
1) Open Source licencing has matured. The principles and pitfalls
are better understood. The BCS can offer a good licence.

2) The BCS can offer protection from a perceived problem with
current licences - the ability to transfer copyright and then
revoke the openness (Estoppel not withstanding).

3) The BCS would be an ideal home for the copyright for national UK
OS projects e.g. Health, Local Government, Defence, Transport.

Disadvantages:
1) The BCS charter may prevent it.
2) The BCS board may not like it.

Both disadvantages are not immutable, though they may take time to resolve.

Malcolm Kendall