“Once besieged by basic questions ranging from ‘is it open
source?’ to ‘will it make money?,’ the open source world is
increasingly facing more mature, nuanced questions and
assertions.“One such that has been picking up steam of late is that open
source licensing is less important than commonly assumed. Reacting
to a piece from the 451 Group, Eclipse’s Ian Skerrett makes the
case that trademarks are the real strategic weapon. Tim O’Reilly,
for his part, has famously declared that ‘open source licenses are
obsolete,’ largely due to their irrelevance (the Affero and such
licenses presumably excepted) to those–like Amazon, Google, et
al–that do not distribute software in the traditional
sense…”