FreeSoftNews

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC)
today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit
against Extreme Networks, Inc. on behalf of its clients, two principal
developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public
License (GPL).

BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used
in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under GPL
version 2. One of the conditions of the GPL is that re-distributors of
BusyBox are required to ensure that each downstream recipient is
provided access to the source code of the program.

Read more at BlueGnu

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license. This article will explain the fundamentals of each license, and will help you in choosing the right license for your open source project.

The first software license that comes to mind for an open source program is the Gnu General Public License(GPL). Created by Richard Stallman in 1989, the GPL is currently at version 3. The GPL is a restrictive license, which actively enforces copyleft”

Read more at DevelopersVoice

There are plenty of high-quality Linux wallpapers that you can get on the web, but not that much for the good-old GNU (GNU’s Not Unix). So, I decided to take some time to find and collect a few of my favorite GNU wallpapers in existence. Here they are in no particular order:

Read more and look the wallpapers at Tech Source From Bohol

Linus Torvalds has an uncomfortable pause at 44:24 in this video.

The uncomfortable pause occurs when he concludes a confused critique of the GNU General Public License.

This video was from 2001 and a lot of time has passed since then. Perhaps Linus is feeling a bit more positive about the GPL than he was at that time. Perhaps not though, because he doesn’t seem very inclined to begin the process of moving the Linux Kernel to GPLv3.

Linus has contributed a lot of time and effort to a very successful and useful GPL-licensed project. That code is running on my computer right now.

Read and look more at FreeSoftwareDaily

After 18 months of widespread consultation with community and corporate interests, the third versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) were released one year ago on 29 June 2007. In November, they were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). Looking back at these licenses today, observers of free and open source software (FOSS) judge them a modest success, and credit them with continuing to educate people about free software.

Read more at Linux.com

Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, marked the first anniversary of the release of version three of the open source GNU General Public License (GPLv3) with a study of trends in its use. Black Duck is the creator and maintainer of the software industry’s most complete source of information on open source licenses, the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which contains information on more than 1,400 licenses.

• Read more: Black Duck Software Marks the One-Year Anniversary of GPLv3 with an Examination of Trends in Use

For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal’s licensing status.  Is it GPL version 2?  Are we moving to GPL version 3?  Could we even if we wanted to?  Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]?  As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize.  Open source is not the same as public domain.  Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software.  For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program.  Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can’t do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.

Read more at Drupal

Pentaho Corp. has released its Linux-compatible, open source business intelligence (BI) software under a GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2) license. The license applies to the version 2 alpha release of the Pentaho BI Platform, as well as future versions, says the company.

The Pentaho BI Platform is the foundational infrastructure that underlies Pentaho’s Open BI Suite. Previous versions had been released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The components that will now be licensed under GPL are the Platform engine core, engine services, engine security, repository, and UI foundation.

Read more at Linux Watch

It used to be that companies could get away with stealing GPLed open-source code into their own software and no one would be the wiser. Those days are done.

Oh, it still happens, but the SFLC’s (Software Freedom Law Center) recent legal actions on behalf of BusyBox’s principal developers have been putting the fear of open-source violations into unscrupulous software companies. In the latest chapter, SFLC has sued Bell Microproducts Inc. and Super Micro Computer Inc. for using BusyBox’s open-source software without honoring its open-source license.

Read more at Practical Technology

Free-software advocate Richard Stallman has spoken out against the association of open-source software with London’s “unethical” Oyster-card system.

In an email sent to ZDNet.co.uk on Monday, Stallman criticised the use of open-source software, such as Red Hat Linux, JBoss middleware and Apache web-server software, in the online payment system for the Oyster contactless cards used on London’s underground rail network.

Online payments cannot be made anonymously, so anyone paying online or linking their Oyster card to a credit card for automatic top-ups is handing their travel information to the government, Stallman argued. He also warned that the RFID chip on the card might be read at other times, allowing information to be gathered besides details of Tube and bus travel.

Read more at ZDNet

You’ve read the GPL’s preamble, you can name the Four Freedoms, and you do your best to keep proprietary bits off our computers. But what’s the future of free software in the era of Flickr, Google Apps, and Facebook?
What it means to be free

The term free software was defined by Richard Stallman. We know Stallman as the founder of the GNU Project, the author of the General Public License, and founder of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman defined free software this way: not by the price of the software, but by the freedoms it accords to its users.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

In a previous post, we have made our point that dual licensing was unfair and community debilitating.

In a search for a better solution, I met this weekend with Ludovic Dubost CEO, Founder and original contributor of XWiki. XWiki.com is making its income out of enterprise support, software guarantees and integration projects. This last part being a substantial source of revenues for XWiki.com

In January 2006 Ludovic faced an important decision: at that time, XWiki was a GNU GPL project with a reasonably growing community but because of it Ludovic was loosing integrations/outsourcing contracts. Some of his potentially largest customers were not comfortable with the GNU GPL.

Read more at Milking The GNU Blog

The court hearing in the “Welte vs. Skype Technologies SA” case went pretty well. Initially the court again suggested that the two parties might reach some form of amicable agreement. We indicated that this has been discussed before and we’re not interested in settling for anything less than full GPL compliance.

The various arguments by Skype supporting their claim that the GPL is violating German anti-trust legislation as well as further claims aiming at the GPL being invalid or incompatible with German legislation were not further analyzed by the court. The court stated that there was not enough arguments and material brought forward by Skype to support such a claim. And even if there was some truth to that, then Skype would not be able to still claim usage rights under that very same license.
Read more at Herald Welte blog

I’m helping to edit what is turning out to be a shockingly good book on the legal issues around open source, from the developer’s perspective, which Van Lindberg is finishing up and which O’Reilly will be publishing. When it comes out, you will want to buy it. It’s incredibly well-written and expresses things much more clearly than I’ve yet seen in my 10 years within the open-source community.

As a case in point, Van explicates the Great Divide between those who love and loathe the GPL by citing a post on the Python mailing list about a controversial bit of code called setuptools:

Read more at CNet

Last week I got the opportunity to fire questions to unarguably one of the most influential and inspirational people of our time. Author of the GNU/Linux operating system, GNU Compiler, GNU debugger (GDB) and notably Emacs, Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 to create a free Unix-like operating system, Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License. Stallman rejected a future where he would have to sign non-disclosure agreements not to share source code or technical information with other software developers and perform other actions he considered betrayals of his principles. He chose instead to share his work with others in what he regarded as a classical spirit of collaboration. I am glad that I got the opportunity to question Stallman about free software, and I also managed to slip in a couple of security and hacker related questions.

Read more at The Hacker Webzine.

The “current and future” thread on this list has got me thinking. Perhaps we really are on the wrong track, that the only way to meet the needs of the gNewSense folks is to have completely different source packages to Ubuntu. If that is the case, then I think it would be better to channel the energy from Gobuntu into gNewSense. I had hoped to see more participation and collaboration around Gobuntu because of the benefits of keeping up with the standard Ubuntu (regular releases, security updates etc). However, it seems that the audience for a platform like this is willing to accept infrequent releases and less maintenance in return for a platform which can be modified more radically. That’s OK, it’s just a bit unexpected - I thought we could get the best of both worlds, with six-monthly releases of something that excluded *binary package* that were controversial in the eyes of the FSF, but retained access to everything else in Ubuntu.

Read more at Ubuntu

Philip Charles has released the K16 snapshot of the Debian GNU/Hurd system. This is the 16th update of the K-series Debian GNU/Hurd installer and marks the first major update of Debian GNU/Hurd since the K14 snapshot released in November 2006. The K16 CD series includes a mini-ISO, 4 full CD images, and 2 DVD images. For the first time, a QEMU image based on the mini-ISO is provided as well.

The QEMU image automatically boots GNU/Hurd and has networking setup so one can conveniently explore Debian GNU/Hurd without having to install or intially configure anything. The announcement has further details.

The K16 snapshot is the first to feature TLS (Thread Local Storage) in GNU Mach, the GNU Hurd’s pthread library and the GNU libc, thanks to the implementation and bug fixes by Samuel Thibault and others. In order to update from the earlier pre-TLS snapshots like K14, users should read the upgrade instructions. K16 also fixes some major installation problems users reported with K14.

Read more at kernelTrap

Your moolah mired in Microsoft Money? Are you ready to quit Quicken? We’ve stumbled across GnuCash, personal and small-business financial-accounting software that’s not only free but available on multiple platforms because of its GNU/Open Source pedigree.

GnuCash has enough financial bells and whistles to compete with the best commercial packages. Based on commercial accounting principles, its features include double entry, accounting, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, and the ability to import files in the QIF, OFX and HBCI file formats.

Read more at Nashuatelegraph.com

Laugh along with GNUThis is a web page designed to provide some laughs to the working hackers.

It contains software, documentation, music, poems, etc. submitted by GNU users and collected by GNU contributers over the years.

Many of the graphics in the GNU Art Gallery also have humorous twists.

Read and look more at GNU website

Our database now contains over 2000 projects that are using the GPL v3. This is a large milestone for the license, and seems to still be the beginning of wider adoption. Nine months have passed since the release of the controversial license and it has already gained 2k projects. At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5000 projects by the end of the year. 5k will be a very substantial amount of projects under the GPL v3, which may influence larger projects to move over the the GPL v3 as well. Then again, the license can begin to cap out, but as of today we have yet to see a decrease in adoption rates.

Read more at Palamida