One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues.

"...This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC’s) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur.

This guide presents a practical guide to ensuring GPL-compliant code, especially in embedded devices.

"Today Loohuis Consulting (LoCo) has released the first version of its comprehensive GPL Compliance Engineering Guide. LoCo is one of few companies in the world that offers commercial GPL license compliance engineering services.

A friend pointed out to me that the Free Software Foundation's "Practical Guide to GPL Compliance" has some intriguing details. One, in particular, caught his eye.

"FSFE's Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org today released a guide to reporting and fixing licence compliance issues. This guide will help users and developers to deal with license violation reports.

I've just heard from the Software Freedom Law Center that the BusyBox-Monsoon Multimedia GPL-enforcement litigation has been settled on the following terms:

Productive and Amicable Negotiations Lead to Settlement of Copyright Infringement Case

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox.

To help reduce the confusion for those managing software projects, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has released a freely distributable guide entitled "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects." Although only 45 pages long -- shorter if you don't count the front matter -- the primer still manages to provide a highly structured introduction to these issues that carefully outlines options and is full of practical advice.

Novell only makes publicly available to anyone, in free access (here and here), only the source code for the packages "as of release", e.g. as on the physical media for SLED 10 SP2, for instance! There is no way to get the sources for the updated packages, unless you're a customer!... Is this GPL-compliant? IANAL, but based on the GPL Compliance Guide, it looks like it's not.