Microsoft has again released code under GPLv2, this time the Live Services plugin Moodle. Microsoft's contribution follows close on the heels of the release of its Hyper-V driver to the Linux kernel under GPLv2. The free Live Services Moodle educational website builder for teachers and students can now be tied in with the Live@edu service for email, calendars and IM.

Moodle, the e-learning system, is one of the most significant and successful projects in open source. Despite its success, with hundreds of thousands of people taught by courses written in Moodle, as a product it is not well known

Moodle is a free and very useful course management system that facilitates the teaching of online classes to all age groups--elementary, middle, high school, and college--as well as organizations and corporations.

TomTom and Microsoft have settled the patent litigation. Here's TechFlash's coverage. According to the Microsoft press release, TomTom will remove functionality regarding the FAT patents within two years, which is no big deal, frankly, and in the meantime, they are covered "in a manner that is fully compliant with TomTom's obligations under the General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2)"

Latest statistics from Black Duck Software show version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2) sliding in popularity. Just under half of all the open source projects contained in the September 2009 statistics used the GPLv2.

Microsoft made waves this week with their GPLv2 contribution of virtualization code. On the other side of the coin, Microsoft continues to take issue with open source vendors over the issue of patents. One vendor that has called on Microsoft to be more open is Red Hat. In a blog post, Red Hat's legal team praised Microsoft's code contribution while asking Microsoft to change its stance on patents.

Microsoft violated the General Public License v2 (GPLv2) when it distributed its Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) without providing source code, says the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

I have been working on providing Microsoft Exchange capability for Akonadi on-and-off for a while.There is an emerging problem though: GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. My code is fine - it is "GPLv2 or later". The incompatibility is that Qt is released under GPLv2 (not "or later")

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.