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Linus Torvalds has said Linux wouldn’t have happened if 386BSD had been around when he started up. We trace the history of FreeBSD and how it’s affected the open source world. Alfresco has announced that it is changing the licensing of the community edition of its enterprise content management system from GPL to LGPL. The move was announced by the company’s CEO, John Newton, in a posting on his blog. He explained that the company had initially gone with the GPL licence three years ago as [...] The Mozilla Labs Bespin project, to create a web based integrated development environment which makes use of cloud functionality, is undergoing a reboot aimed at making Bespin easier to work with and extend. Bespin was introduced in February 2009 by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almear. In September 2009, Galbraith and Almear moved to Palm, which [...] Richard Stallman raised more than a few eyebrows when he signed the letter objecting to the MySQL purchase. Endorsing, or seeming to endorse, the practice of selling proprietary exceptions to GPL’ed software seemed entirely out of character with Stallman’s comments on Free Software up to that point. To clarify, Stallman has written up an essay [...] In our efforts at Groklaw to explain the General Public License, or GPL, over the years, we’ve used many words. But the other day I asked if anyone could think of a way to show it graphically, and PolR has done it. Reading the recent discussions about GNOME’s position in the GNU Project, I’m reminded of Utah Phillip’s comment that “a long memory is the most radical notion in history.” The way that the discussion has been reported in the media, you would hardly guess that the discussion is the latest round in an ongoing and disquieting [...] On behalf of the developers of the BusyBox embedded utilities collection, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed suit against 14 consumer electronics companies for violating GPLv2 licensing requirements. The lawsuit covers almost 20 Linux-based products, from companies including Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC, says the SFLC. Eben Moglen has sent a letter to the EU Commission essentially in support of Oracle/Sun: Microsoft has confirmed that GPL licensed code was included in the WIndows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT). WUDT allows users to transfer downloaded Windows 7 images to a USB drive or burn them to DVD media. According to a blog posting by Peter Galli, Microsoft’s Open Source Community Manager, the code was included by the [...] This week I was in Grenoble for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. On the seond day of the conference — Friday — I was one of the few people wandering around in a suit. Even the guys who normally wear suits had dressed down to deal with the nitty-gritty of kernel threads, time sources, and [...] The Free Software Foundation has announced its new “GNU Bucks” bounty program. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it will begin rewarding those who find and report any nonfree components in free software operating system distributions with public recognition and “GNU Bucks.” The FSF maintains a list of guidelines covering what it means [...] One of the fallback positions for purveyors of FUD is that the GNU GPL may not be valid, because it hasn’t been properly tested in court. That’s getting increasingly implausible as a stance. After being upheld in Germany a few times, here’s a big decision in its favour in France: Brian Gough, a GNU Scientific Library developer, has announced that registration for this years GNU Hackers Meeting has now opened. The meetings theme is “the continued advancement of the GNU system” and is intended for active GNU maintainers and contributors. Discussion and talks are encouraged on various subjects, including challenges for software freedom and the [...] If most developers contribute to open-source projects because they want to, rather than because they’re forced to, why do we have the GNU General Public License? Microsoft has announced that it is releasing it’s Hyper-V Linux drivers as GPL licensed software. The drivers allow Linux operating systems, running as guests of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation to bypass the emulation of hardware and talk directly to the hypervisor for I/O operations. This in turn improves the performance of the hypervisor and the guest [...] If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to [...] In June of 2007, after many months delay, the Free Software Software Foundation released GPLv3. Since that time, the license has been gaining an increased following, but without much threat to GPLv2 in first place. There was an interesting announcement from Eduardo Lima of the Canola project in his speech in Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend yesterday in Brazil. The Canola project announced that they are going to license their project with additional permissions to GPLv3 in order to provide their code “in different kinds of business models and product offerings, [...] Cisco is only the latest on the long list of companies that have been forced by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to comply with the GPL. The Center uses copyright law to protect the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL. Maybe it is just in my mind, but some new Linux Distributors cannot redact good license terms for their works. Even some of them have written license too narrow (in excess from my point of view) that they look like the one of an infamous Proprietary OS… | |||||
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