Questions on FOSS Licenses

Q1. Can I really use open source software for commercial product development ?

• Well the real answer is absolutely you can use it without fault. 
• The company that uses the software needs to adhere to the license given provided with the open source software. 

Q2. Can I really use open source software for distribution under a commercial license ?

• Now that depends on the license of the open software that you would use.
• Non-copyleft licenses or Permissive licenses permit you to re-distribute the software with the new changes. 
• They play well with commercial licenses as long as you adhere to the open source license

Q3. Do I have to pay anything to the company that released the open source software ?

• If the software is provided with source code under any of the open source compatible
• licenses then there is no payment to the parent company. 
• The companies usually maintain 2 versions of their software - Open source and Commercial version.

Q4. Which license permits me to modify the open source code and keep the changes closed ?

Non-Copyleft licenses : 

• Apache 2.0 License
• Berkley Sockets Distribution (BSD) License 
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) License
• Other Compatible licenses

These licenses are usually compatible with other permissive Non-copyleft licenses and commercial licenses.

Q5. Which license requires me to submit the changes done back to the community ?

• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
• GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)
• Mozilla Public License  (MPL)
• Other Compatible Licenses

Reference : 

1. Licensing HOW-TO by Eric R. Raymond

Unreferenced Articles :

1. Businessmans' Guide to Open source Licenses by Kristof Kovacs (new - good read)

MEAP Opensource

Recently wanted to look up the progress of MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform) software and if there are any stable open source releases of such platforms.

Possible Open source Candidates :
OpenMEAP
Convertigo

There has been some Questions on the Future of MEAP and its viability. The main issue here is how do you create a cross-platform (developed for one but can work on another) MEAP application.

Every application developed and deployed for a MEAP setup is married to it for life. If you intend to discontinue the vendor, you just cannot do it at the drop of a hat. Thats when the porting market would open up. Which means porting the app-set developed for one MEAP setup into another.

A combination of HTML5+JavaScript+Standard Framworks = Prevention of Vendor lock-in or technology lock-in for that mattar !

Other (non-open source) Candidates :
AnyPresence

Disclaimer : This is an In-Progress article.

Convert Visio to PDF

Trying to view a Visio file format (.VSD) on OSX or Linux (anything but MS Windows). The possibilities are out there ...

Options  to convert VSD to PDF :
1. Steps to convert it using open source :

• Convert VSD to an Image. Eg. VSD2PNG Tool 
• Convert the Image into PDF. Eg. ImageMagick Tool

2. Faster to use an online conversion tool. Eg. Zamzar.com Tool

What did I do ?
Initially looked at the options available and quickly resorted to Zamzar.com to convert the VSD into PDF since productivity was on the top of my list.

For a more permanent solution, have downloaded VSD2PNG and would try to convert into SVG image format.

Once I have the image, would convert it into PDF using Image Magick.

Reference :

• Convert MS Visio (VSD) Drawing into PDF Automatically
• Convert Images to PDF from Command line on Linux

XMPP Protocol

Try developing async/push based gaming/enterprise architecture using XMPP Protocol.
eJabberd is one of the available stable implementations of the protocol for production use.

We used javascript based mobile clients to login to the server and share snippets of data between users. In fact at one point we even used gmail usernames to login and communicate data with one another ie. gaming data.

This was during the initial days of mobile development for Android/iPhone platforms when we needed to generate sales through marketing apps. We were successful at implementing a robust asynchronous communication using xmpp over http flawlessly.

The architecture was robust enough to be used for any kind of asynchronous data communication using publish-subscribe model.

Jabber.org is still an open service for xmpp clients although their commercial arm Jabber.com has been acquired by Cisco back in 2008.

Jabber Logo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License

Apache Flex Incubating

Amazing to know that Flex has been growing steadily over the last 1 year under incubation at Apache.

Waiting to see the realms of possibilities for extending flex sdk for multiple dimensions - browsers, desktops & devices smartphones, tablets and tv) in the coming years.

Project URL : http://incubator.apache.org/flex (flex.org redirects here)

Latest Project Release :

Download Apache Flex® 4.8.0 (source)

The Apache Flex team is pleased to offer this 'parity' release, available as of 7/19/2012. This is the first available Flex SDK under the Apache Licensing model, and is designed to be compatible with the Adobe Flex SDK version 4.6.0.

Apache Flex Logo © Copyright 2011-2012 Apache Flex. 

Userland Frontier

Happened to search about an end-of-life weblog software: Userland Frontier, while browsing through Joelonsoftware.com's About page.

His reference to the use of Frontier as his weblog in the initial days led me down memory lane and it seems that the product has been GPLed since 2004 as described on their Wikipedia page.

I remember trying out Frontier as a trial software for windows 97 during 2003. Plan to try it out on my MacBookPro in 2012 , almost 8 years later. It could be a great tool to keep track of documents on my local server.

The Opensource releases of Frontier are uploaded at frontierkernel.org. The last update on their sourceforge page is about a year a go.

I would have presumed some one would have forked and re-forked the project multiple times if the original project has been offered to opensource domain.

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