There's a lot to think about in the land of Open Source these days, much discussion, and much discussiion to come. And there is much rethinking.

This is a discussion that readers of this blog should be following and, where it makes sense, contributing to.

First, consider carefully the discussion opened by Tim O'Reilly's recent post "Open Source Licenses Are Obsolete," which, not surprisingly, has generated some controversy and discussion. However, O'Reilly raises several key points, one of which has been discussed for a while - how do software license models, including Open Source licenses, work in a world that is moving toward "software as a service" models?

At the same time, work on a major revision of the General Public license continues. The current draft of version 3 of the GPL is here. John Paczkowski's humorously titled post is a good intro to the GPL revision, covering Linus Torvald's objections and giving some good links.

I've written about the Open Source licenses in what I hope is a practical and understandable way (links here).

The Open Source licenses, Open Source software and the Open Source philosophy and community may well be the most significant and influential area of technology today. It's a subject that you must educate yourself about.

Wikis at work, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP Ramp SOA Spec Efforts: "The group also has setup what they call a 'vendor-neutral Web site, designed as a wiki' they will use to collaborate, communicate and gain feedback from developers. There's a place for news, white papers, public specifications and access to information on early deployments."

From the home page:

The core legal mechanism of the GNU GPL is that of copyleft, which requires modified versions of GPL'd software to be GPL'd themselves. Copyleft is essential for preventing the enclosure of the free software commons, today as it was in 1991. But today's environment is more complex and diverse; thus, a fully effective copyleft calls for additional legal measures. Devising these measures is complicated by another aspect of our success: the worldwide adoption of free software principles. We hope and expect that contributors to GPLv3 will come from all over the globe, and from every developer, distributor, and user constituency.

Bookmark the site and follow and/or join the discussion.

It goes without saying that this state of affairs again raises the "are we safer now?" question and, if you read the entire article, you'll wonder where priorities really lie in the current bureaucratic approaches.

HOWEVER . . .

In the middle of Hayes' article comes one of the most intriguing, even innovative ideas we are likely to see in the field of intelligence analysis.

Consider this quote:

Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

Fascinating stuff. Surely putting thousands of eyes onto these documents must be better that storing them in boxes. It would also be interesting to see what cutting-edge scanning and analytical tools used in electronic discovery could do with these materials.

I encourage you to read the article and draw your own conclusions. I find this story quite troubling and think that it would be a good idea to "open source" this material rather than to keep it in closed boxes. A public debate over the issue would also be worthwhile. Consider this approach in contrast to John Robb's recent comments on the problems of isolated decision-making.