U.S Congress ponders Open Source licenses [LWN.net]

Some members of the U.S. Congress are looking into which software licenses will and will not be allowed for release of government-sponsored software. Alert LWN readers dwheeler, Barry Gould and Magnus Lycka have sent in links for three articles addressing this issue.

This Newsforge article by Robin "Roblimo" Miller looks at how open source advocates are lobbying the U.S. congress as members decide which software licenses are and are not allowed for release of government-sponsored software.

InformationWeek focuses on Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., whose biggest campaign contributor is Microsoft, who has added an addendum to an official letter that criticized open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The topic is causing ripples as far away as Australia, as seen in this article in TheAge.

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U.S Congress ponders Open Source licenses

Posted Oct 25, 2002 18:05 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

There were a couple of articles on LawMeme about this too.

http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=435

http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=443

In the first, Ernest Miller wrote a rebuttal to the
letter and a bit of discussion followed. In the second,
Ernest pointed out that Adam Smith had mislead the other
representatives.