http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3508051 May 26, 2005 The Future of Free Software Lies in The Past By Clint Boulton NEW YORK -- Eben Moglen is convinced the software industry is returning to being about a free exchange of ideas and code. The lawyer for the Free Software Foundation said during a keynote at the LinuxWorld Summit that the IT world will return to a time before large businesses co-opted freely licensable software for proprietary products. Moglen, who sharply disagrees with software patents because they hinder free use models, advocates the two existing models of free software provisions. One is for permissive use, which allows anyone to use, modify and make a piece of software into any product. BSD licensing is an example of this model. The other model, which includes the GNU General Public License (GPL) maintained by the Free Software Foundation, permits users to use, modify and make applications with code, with the understanding that it may not be used in proprietary products. Moglen said users who need software can find an abundance of code to use for software building in online machine tool shops, such as SourceForge. In that community, he said some 95,000 programming projects are being worked on by roughly 490,000 programmers in their spare time. To gauge how productive SourceForge and the open source community can be, he created a metric where if one subtracts the amount of people at Microsoft who don't make software (those who sell products and other corporate cogs), SourceForge is currently equal to 1.35 Microsofts. By the end of the decade, that figure would see SourceForge equal 3.7 of the Redmond software giants, he estimated. Moglen wound down the keynote discussion at LinuxWorld by lamenting the existence of too many open source licenses, noting that the 55 to 60 in existence only beckon additional legal risks for businesses. -- Diego Saravia [email protected]