For years, the software industry has been trending away from so-called 'copyleft' licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) and toward permissive, Apache-style licensing. Given the rising importance of developers, this isn't surprising: developers just want to get work done without being bogged down by license requirements. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that permissive Apache licensing may simply be a way station on the road to no licensing at all.

That's what GitHub seems to be telling us, anyway.

A Trend Toward Extreme Permissiveness

Early in the life of free and open-source software, copyleft licensing reigned supreme. But for years, permissive licenses like BSD and MIT have been climbing, as Redmonk analyst Donnie Berkholz nicely pictures:

Not content to stop there, however, we seem to be entering a new phase: the no-license model. As free-software advocate Glyn Moody notes, "the logical conclusion of the move to more 'permissive' licences [is] one that permits everything."

While Moody talks about public domain software, the GitHub generation seems to be less fussy about legal mechanics.

The GitHub License Black Hole

As Aaron Williamson, senior staff counsel with the Software Freedom Law Center, presented at this year's Linux Collaboration Summit, the vast majority of projects on GitHub don't appear to carry any license terms at all. (The Register's Neil McAllister offers a great summary.) GitHub has become the gathering point for modern open-source development, so it's hugely significant that a mere 14.9% (219,326) of the 1,692,135 code repositories Williamson scanned had a file in their top-level directories that specified a license. 

In other words, the vast majority of code on GitHub isn't necessarily open source. Or proprietary software. Or, well, anything. It's just code.

Redmonk analyst James Governor nailed this trend in 2012, arguing that "younger devs today are about POSS - Post open source software." For such developers, Governor holds, licensing and governance are an afterthought: the code is all. Both Gartner and Forrester find that open source is booming precisely because developers want flexibility.

Less licensing = more flexibility.

Is Licensing Necessary?

Not that this approach is unproblematic. Outercurve Foundation board member Stephen Walli posits that such "promiscuous" sharing without governance and licensing will lead to "software transmitted diseases." But it's unclear that the GitHub generation cares. Maybe they will. Maybe they'll wake up and smell the need for licensing. 

Or maybe the project/company they create will attract the interest of a would-be buyer, and suddenly source code hygeine will matter. A lot. As a Black Duck study shows, open-source compliance is becoming an increasingly common question in mergers and acquisitions:

But all is not lost. Berkholz analyzed a wide array of projects to determine the interplay between project size and licensing. As he summarizes, "as projects grow, they tend to sort out any licensing issues, likely because they get corporate users, professional developers, etc."

License rebels, in other words, tend to become less rebellious as their projects mature.

Ultimately, then, we almost certainly don't face an industry meltdown stemming from uncertain code provenance. Instead, we have a highly permissive license culture that helps to foster the development of code in the early phases of open-source development, which graduates to Apache-style licensing as projects catch on. Lawyers can rest easy. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With all the recent teeth gnashing about startup investment shifting from consumer to enterprise technology, it's worth noting that successfully cracking the enterprise market is no easy task:

• 70% of the U.S. economy hinges on consumer spending. Even with the pending fiscal cliff, it's kind of hard to ignore the numbers. 
• Enterprise technology is not a short game.

Unlike most consumer technologies, enterprise infrastructure and applications run on a much longer upgrade cycle: 5-7 years. While you might ditch your smartphone every year or two for a newer model, few companies are willing to swap out their CRM systems, storage or security technologies that quickly.

Switching behavior is both the most complicated and important subject in the enterprise technology market. Even if enterprise customers have good reasons to be unhappy with their technology vendors (e.g., lack of innovation, price gouging, poor support), their business runs on that technology. This makes them highly incentivized to see existing vendors address any issues and continue the relationship. As we all know, moving's a bitch.

Of course, enterprise tech is a rich, rewarding game, so it's worth exploring the strategies startups can use to overcome the barriers to switching in the enterprise market:

1. Transformational Technologies. The ultimate startup is the one that changes the game on an incumbent in such a way that the latter neither can block nor retaliate. Classic examples include Virtualization and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Because virtualization decouples compute functions from hardware (while running on top of the hardware), it is the ultimate disruptor because it's non-invasive. SaaS eliminates the stickiness of packaged software - and the lucrative support contracts that go along with it. Interestingly, while there tend to be many attackers in Virtualization and SaaS, only a few players tend to win big. Very big: witness VMware and Salesforce.

2. Changing Product Cycles. Catching technology giants in product transition cycles is one of the most effective ways to insert new technologies. However, this usually requires an outside force to speed insertion. Earlier in my career, Intel Centrino drove the need for enterprise Wi-Fi and forced an architectural change. In 2013 you can see many great examples of this idea, including Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, ServiceNow and Workday. These transition cycles don't last forever, though. Over time the incumbents typically build or buy their way into the new product segment and the situation stabilizes until a new cycle begins.

3. Trojan Horses. Sometimes a new enterprise IT category emerges in an indirect way. Cloud infrastructure eliminates the need to buy IT hardware and software; the rental model emerged as form of shadow IT for specific projects that could not wait for corporate IT to respond. It also became the preferred approach for brand new businesses (Netflix streaming). Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, two big early winners in cloud computing, sell computing cycles by the month, payable with with a credit card - often bypassing traditional IT purchasing processes. Once established, Cloud and SaaS vendors can then turn their attention to selling to mainstream IT.

4. New Buying Centers. The multi-hundred billion-dollar enterprise IT game now pivots on competition for the IT "stack," as we shift from the Client-Server/Web mobel to cloud computing. This change has created a new class of IT decision makers such as the "cloud architect." As companies move more to the cloud, this new IT leadership category drives key decisions for enabling new applications, also driving the buying all of the underlying IT components. And these new buyers may not be as wedded to the incumbent suppliers as were the decision makers they supplant.

5. The Consumerization of IT. The iPhone led to a watershed change both in enterprise mobility and computing. Not only did it challenge corporate purchasing patterns ("I buy, you enable," also known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device), it eliminated a final barrier to what constituted a business device. This is less about "consumerizing" enterprise IT, but rather, adapting enterprise IT to leverage consumer technologies. In addition to mobile devices, apps are challenging the application market for business software.

6. Coalitions of the Willing. For most small companies, hiring a large enterprise sales force and entering a year-long acquisition cycle is likely to be an expensive exercise in futility. Sure, you might be able to make a living selling to universities, hospitals and niche verticals, but attacking the Fortune 500 requires friends who need another reason to re-engage in a selling conversation. Manufacturing and strategic partnerships with hardware makers made a lot security companies rich during the client-server era (e.g., McAfee, Symantec). Today, companies like Box are changing the game through new kinds of partnership integrations.

Frontal assaults are the hardest attack strategy for an enterprise startup. Attacking a powerful technology company's profit sanctuary tends to piss them off. If you can pull it off, it might just get your company acquired, but run a big risk of perishing in the attempt.

That's why this tends to be the strategy of large companies (e.g., HP's acquisition of 3Com to attack Cisco) and does not have a great track record. The assault on the business PC by iOS and Android tablets and smartphones may turn out be a more successful example, but, Apple and Google and Samsung are hardly startups.

It can be done, of course. Many decades ago, Microsoft's PC operating system was such a technology and for a generation, a small company in Redmond changed the world. (With a big initial boost from IBM, of course.)

Current technologies that might have the power to force enterprises to switch and create hugely successful startups include Apache Hadoop, Network Virtualization, Flash Storage, and Cloud Storage and Collaboration. That's where I'd look for the next big thing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Version 7.0 of DotNetNuke, an open-source content-management system that you've probably never heard of, is now released and bringing enterprise-level web content functionality to users committed to Microsoft-based infrastructure. The .NET-based DotNetNuke will be a significant player in a growing cloud-computing environment where Microsoft Web servers may be more relevant.

Web Servers: Where Microsoft Doesn't Rule

Depending on how you examine the data, less than one-fifth of the world's sites run Microsoft-based Web servers like Internet Information Server. And, unlike all the cool kids running open-source code like Apache and nginx, IIS players don't always want to run popular content-management systems like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress.

[Update: The preceding paragraph was corrected to update an error regarding the capabilities of CMS systems and IIS. -BKP]

Let's be honest: 16.52% of the world's tracked Web servers running IIS in November 2012 is tiny compared to Apache's 57.23% share. But having almost 17% of servers locked up is still a heck of lot of sites -- 103.3 million, actually. Even if just 1% of them need a WordPress-like CMS, that's a little over a million sites pining away.

It's all very well to snicker at these shops and prescribe spinning up some Apache-on-Linux servers, and installing Joomla or one of the other CMSes. But CIOs make IT investments for a strategic reason and have put a lot of time and money into their infrastructure. Generally, they're not just rolling dice, which means it's not always easy to get them to shift to non-Microsoft technologies.

Enter DotNetNuke Corp., maker of its self-named .NET-based platform. The CMS plays very well with native Microsoft tech and provides CIOs a robust tool that compares favorably with Drupal. Since its initial release in late 2002, DotNetNuke has enjoyed a strong following within the Microsoft ecosystem, and has about 800,000 registered users, according to Shaun Walker, co-founder and CTO of the company.

Filling The .NET Gap

The latest iteration of DotNetNuke has a broad range of new features, with a new interface that includes a more-robust editor and version-management system, as well as Active Directory support so enterprise employees can plug into site-content systems seamlessly. Cascading-style-sheet management is reportedly a lot easier to use, which should make designers happy.

DotNetNuke is a bit of an oddity within the Microsoft world. It's actually an open-source licensed platform, using an MIT software license. The MIT license is what's known as a permissive license, which means the code for the software is open but users and developers aren't required to publish their changes, as with restrictive licenses like the GNU General Public License. Walker highlighted this as one reason why Microsoft-oriented customers don't have a problem with using an open-source platform.

That DotNetNuke's potential market is such a small minority of servers in the world might seem like a liability, but Walker believes that there is a lot of potential for DotNetNuke just around the corner. With the advent of HTML5 and Java-based sites, "pretty soon the underlying architecture won't matter as much."

If development does shift more to the client-side layer, then the Web server layer where Apache, nginx, and IIS live would become more of an abstraction. Given the relatively low cost of cloud-based instances of even IIS, companies with more .Net assets and developers might therefore migrate to IIS in order to streamline their IT resources.

That's the vision Walker has, but it remains to be seen if IIS can experience strong growth, even in the cloud, up against the free Apache and nginx servers.

For now, DotNetNuke soldiers on, filling a gap for IT managers who are still dedicated to the Microsoft Way.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.