Archive for the 'Licensing' Category

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) will be holding an event considering the relationship between Open Standards, Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory terms (FRAND), and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Thursday 29th March 2012, from 1800 to 2100 hours.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments. To book a place to attend please email Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org

Background

The Cabinet Office opened an Open Standards Consultation on 9 February 2012 which closes for comments on 3 May 2012. Within question one http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/question1/ is the sub-question:

How could adopting (Fair) Reasonable and Non Discriminatory ((F)RAND) standards deliver a level playing field for open source and proprietary software solution providers?

Dependent upon on your viewpoint FRAND is possibly one of the most contentious terms that could be applied to FOSS because it conflicts with some potentially important aspects of it. As well as the view of the UK Government and the awaited outcome of the Cabinet Office Open Standards Consultation there is activity taking place in the EU Parliament that may affect the use of FOSS due to FRAND.

Aim of event

This event aims to unravel the relationship between Open Standards, FRAND, and FOSS and therefore make it clear what affect this relationship has for the practical application of Open Source. For instance – Would the use of the GPL licence and other OSI approved licences be affected?; Would the UK Government be constrained in what Open Source software it could use? or Could ways be found around such problems?

The findings from this event will be passed on to the BCS Policy Hub to feed into an overall BCS response to the Cabinet Office Open Standards Consultation. The BCS Policy Hub Consultation can be found at http://www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/43785 where comments should be submitted by 18th April 2012.

Speaker

Gerry Gavigan, Chair, Open Source Consortium (OSC), http://www.opensourceconsortium.org will discuss Royalty Free (RF) Open Standards and FRAND, which will involve active audience participation in that discussion.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) will be held on 14th May 2009 from 1800 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA.

Please send nominations for all OSSG Committee member posts to Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org

The procedure governing elections is set out in the OSSG Constitution at http://ossg.bcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/OpenSourceConstitutionFinal.pdf

An event TBC is due to commence immediately after the business of the AGM has been concluded.

Free buffet and refreshments available.

For further information please contact Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org

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