25 years after Stallman first set the GNU project in motion, what have these ideals achieved, and what can we do to ensure the future of free software? Linux Format spoke to him to find out.
While Linus Torvalds gets most of the plaudits nowadays for the Linux kernel, it was Stallman who originally posted plans [...]

Savio questions the usefulness of AGPL and his argument seems very slippery to me. He questions whether the Affero GPL is an obstacle to the development of more free/libre open source software. He uses Facebook as an example company that is contributing back modifications to memcached, software that FB uses after having it heavily [...]

Many sceptics were convinced that as free software spread out beyond hackers into the general computing sector the rigorous GNU GPL licence would gradually be replaced by more accommodating – meaning weaker – forms, since it was “obvious” that its unbending rules were too strict for widespread use. In fact, the GPL has grown in [...]

“The future of software is in cloud computing,” says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, a company that provides mobile services. And if free and open source software (FOSS) is going to survive in that emerging market, he says, then the community needs to adjust by promoting greater use of the GNU Affero General Public License [...]

Adoption of GPLv3 has surpassed many older licenses in a short time, according to licence watcher Black Duck Software, reports The Register.
According to Black Duck, GPLv3 is now the fifth most chosen licence in the open source community, used in 6 300 projects, and is expected to snatch the number four slot from BSD in [...]

Free Software Foundation Europe’s Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org have just formed a partnership that has released a guide to reporting and fixing license violations.
“The best way to solve compliance issues is to prevent them happening in the first place”, says Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator. “We work to support this [...]

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election.
Black and white by Linus Torvalds
Linus begins with this:
So I’m pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 [...]

Since the release of GPLv3, technology pundits have been opining about how adoption is unlikely, usually citing Linux’s still-GPLv2 status as (often their only) example. Even though I’m a pro-GPLv3 (and, specifically, pro-AGPLv3) advocate, I have never been troubled by slow adoption, as long as it remained on a linear upswing from release day onward [...]

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) yesterday announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL). The latest release of the licence now allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 licence.
The foundation says that this new permission has been added at the request of [...]

After two years of litigation, the parties involved in an Israeli law suit that centered on the validity of the GNU General Public License (GPL) have settled out of court. The result leaves the legal status of the GPL in Israel unresolved.
As reported earlier on Linux.com, the case began in early 2006 when Alexander Rabinovitch, [...]

Armijn Hemel has posted the GPL Compliance Engineering Guide [PDF], a manual describing how the gpl-violations.org project finds GPL-licensed software on embedded systems. “Often there is device, firmware, source tarball (or any combination thereof) that you are asked to check for compliance. Depending on the situation, a lot of work could be required to discover [...]

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 — Since its release ten days ago, Stephen Fry’s film “Happy Birthday to GNU” at www.gnu.org/fry has been viewed over a half-million times, and today the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the availability of twenty-four translations including Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew, that have been prepared especially [...]

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many [...]

A top Debian contributor has been left “pretty disappointed” by elements of the Debian community for failing to comply with the conditions of the GNU GPLv2 license.
Daniel Baumann, who maintains the Debian Syslinux bootloader package, has said Debian components were being released only in binary form without source code - resulting in problems for Apple [...]

No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It’s leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind.
Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to create [...]

The Software Freedom Law Center has released A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance, a document which appears to be aimed at corporate management. It is a detailed and clear discussion of the issues as seen from the SFLC point of view. “The companies we contact about GPL violations often respond with: ‘We didn’t know there [...]

I’m not above engaging in a little shameless name-dropping, especially when I know the dropped name will spark a reaction. So while chatting with attendees at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week, I made no secret of the fact that I had interviewed Richard Stallman a few days earlier. I marveled [...]

In February of last year, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, spoke at the International Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana about what he strongly believes are the merits of non-proprietary software. I recently learned directly from Stallman what that experience was like.
I interviewed Stallman at length on July [...]

Today the Linux world broke out the champagne to celebrate VMware joining the Linux Foundation. I agree. It’s good news.
What it doesn’t resolve is the allegation that VMware is in active and conscious violation of the GPL. Some of these allegations appear to be well-founded. VMware’s lack of response to the allegations is not golden, [...]

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU [...]