Eddie Tejeda, a talented web developer based here in Brooklyn who has been working with us of late, has a thought-provoking post on the need for a new software licensing paradigm for web-based applications:

When open source licenses were developed, we thought of software as something that processed local and isolated data, or sometimes data in a limited network. The ability to access or process that data depended on the ability to have the software installed on your machine.

Now more and more software is moving from local machines to the web, and with it an ever-increasing stockpile of our personal data and intellectual property (think webmail, free blog hosting like Blogger, MySpace and other social networking sites, and media-sharing sites like Flickr or YouTube). The question becomes: if software is no longer a tool that you install but rather a place to which you upload yourself, how is your self going to be protected? What should be the rules of this game?