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Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing

Readers of Nonprofit Online News will be aware of my longstanding interest in open source software. If you share that interest or if you or your organization have any kind of intellectual property whose value to your community you want to enhance through licensing, then I highly recommend that you buy Andrew M. St Laurent's book Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing. The book is very clearly and engagingly written. It provides political, economic, and social contexts for each of the licenses that it describes and thus gives very solid advice about when you might want to use which license. It covers all the prominent licensing models (including BSD, GPL, and Creative Commons) as well as a number that you probably haven't come across. As a nice touch, the book itself is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Posted: 12/7/04; 5:49:05 PM #

Benchmarking for Nonprofits: How To Measure, Manage, And Improve Performance

Jason Saul likes numbers even more than I do. He's been working in the field of benchmarking nonprofit performance for years and has finally written a book about it: Benchmarking for Nonprofits: How To Measure, Manage, And Improve Performance. As befits something published by Wilder, the book is very practical in nature, with step by step instructions on how to move your organization toward better measurements of success and better processes for learning from those measurements. As much as I'm an advocate for good metrics, I have my worries that we often end up giving more weight to the things we can easily measure, rather than working to measure those things that truly have the greatest weight. But aside from that caveat, this book is a great place to start. Posted: 12/7/04; 5:48:09 PM #