OSS/FS or FLOSS or FOSS has risen to great prominence.

 

http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

 

Briefly, OSS/FS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers).

 

"Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license."

 

Under Creative Commons license.

 

http://orange.blender.org/

 

Open source offers a fantastic way to reach developers and users of one's technology. Ironically, however, the very group most inclined to adopt open source is the least likely to pay for it.

Therefore, to make an open-source business thrive in enterprise software, vendors must learn to distinguish between developer-users and IT operations-buyers. This article explains, however, open-source companies may need to guard against becoming too successful in order to preserve their exit opportunities.

Lately, Over the past several months, we have been hearing that Sun's long-awaited initiative to open source Java has kicked into high gear. On November 13th came the official announcement: All of Sun's JVM implementations, the compiler, the Hotspot engine and J2SE APIs will be open sourced until mid' 2007. What led Sun to this drastic act? Is it too little, too late? What are the influences on large vendors and on small ISV? What are the legal, architectural and other implications? How will Sun make sure that Java will not end up fragmented as the Linux platform? All these questions and more... Acrobat slides attached