licensing

One of the advantages to being a large, enterprise software company is that it can provide your sales people with a wide array of products to sell to new and existing customers. Upsell and cross-sell opportunities abound.

As a customer of such a vendor, however, this selection can be as confusing as it is appetizing.

Such is the case with Microsoft and its bewildering licensing forest, according to The Register. As Microsoft adds another layer of complexity to its offerings - that of "cloud-based services" - its licensing complexity is poised to become even more Byzantine, a headache-in-waiting for Microsoft's channel partners, which sell the majority of its software:

Resellers can expect to contend with a different biz model to simply punting software...Now it's not just about software but hosted services, migration and integration, business process consulting and desktop managed services as well. That's a fact that could prove a big headache for some.

[Microsoft] sees it more as an "opportunity for partners to see revenue growth in a number of areas"....[but] Ovum analyst David Mitchell, a guest at Microsoft's central London event, said the firm had presented its resellers with "too many logos and too many questions".… Read more

Microsoft has been criticized in the past for how it manages CodePlex, Microsoft's "open source project hosting site" (emphasis mine). This time, as The Register reports, Microsoft is hosting code that can only be run on the Windows platform.

This is not, of course, a violation of open source. Plenty of projects on Sourceforge will run on only Linux, or some other operating system.

No, the problem here is that Microsoft is restricting these projects to Windows by license, and not merely be technical capability.

In at least one instance, that of the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF), Microsoft switched the license from its Windows-only Microsoft Limited Permissive License (Ms-LPL) to the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), an Open Source Initiative-certified license, under pressure from Miguel de Icaza and "community feedback." The reason given for putting the code under the MS-LPL in the first place is lame, however:… Read more

The Copyright Royalty Board on Thursday froze the rate that digital-music stores such as iTunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody must pay music publishers.

The three-member board that sets statutory copyright licenses e-mailed the Digital Media Association (DiMA), the National Music Publishers' Association, Apple, and other download stores with its decision to keep the royalty rate at 9.1 cents a song. The board also set the same rate for CDs and established a 24-cent rate for ringtones. The decision is the first time the board has established royalty rates for digital downloads. The rates are set for the next five years. … Read more

Transmeta's chips are on the block. The former supplier of low-power Intel-compatible processors said Wednesday that it is actively seeking a buyer, and also announced two agreements with Intel.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, which has remade itself into a supplier of chip-related intellectual property, said that after exploring a range of "strategic alternatives" over the past few months and after strengthening its balance sheet, it will seek a sale as a way to "enhance value for all its stockholders."

Transmeta is working with financial adviser Piper Jaffray.

Back in February, Transmeta weighed an unsolicited offer … Read more

Texting is more dangerous than drunken driving, Mercedes rolls out a hybrid, BMW puts Google search in the dash, and we drive the Porsche Cayenne GTS.

• Texting worse than being drunk when it comes to driving

• Mercedes S400 BlueHybrid

• Clean diesel Jetta TDI good in all 50 states

• RFID driver's licenses in N.Y.

• Google search comes to BMW dashboards

• Cayenne GTS driver's notes

• Pontiac G3 on the way. Oh boy.

File this one under "driver tech" instead of "car tech." The State of New York has started offering driver's licenses embedded with RFID chips, or enhanced driver's licenses (EDLs). The news comes on the heels of New York becoming the second state to offer identification that can be shown at the border in lieu of a U.S. passport (which is also RFID-embedded).

The radio frequency identification chip in the EDL will be able to be scanned by authorities to identify citizens entering the state from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. Intercontinental travelers will … Read more

There was some distressing news buried in Sean Michael Kerner's look into Novell's and Microsoft's virtualization partnership. The news, however, had nothing to do with virtualization, and everything to do with Microsoft job titles.

This was a product announcement, yet Microsoft resorted to its legal department for quotations??? (Novell, of course, offered up a "senior product marketing manager." It has yet to become a licensing company, and is still focused on thriving as a software company.)

The two Microsoft employees quoted have bizarro job titles:

Update at 6:45 .p.m. with additional information about QPI licensing.

Nvidia's last-minute conference announcement has turned into a bit of shocker.

Despite all the chest thumping at its gaming conference this week, the high drama of Nvision reached its denouement with a waving of the white flag. The world's largest graphics chip supplier announced support for high-end gaming graphics using Intel silicon. This has raised doubts about its clout in the gaming PC industry, based on the reaction at many hardware enthusiast Web sites and at least one PC maker.

Representative of the shock expressed after … Read more

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.

The reasoning Shankland reports for Google belatedly approving the licenses, however, is a bit bizarre. In the case of the EPL, Google's Chris DiBona argues:

Eclipse is an important, lively, and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or … Read more