"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, November 3, 2008 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). This version of the license allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license..."

During a phone briefing with media a few minutes ago, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said Ubuntu Server 9.04 has been tested to run on 45 different server configurations from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo and smaller providers. And Shuttleworth also hinted that Canonical's server relationship with HP is growing stronger. Here are the details.

Sun Microsystems last week said it will soon open source the core components of Sun Java System Web Proxy and Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. The Web and Proxy source code will be released later this year.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to release the code for its open-source server virtualization software Wednesday, and will make a commercial version of the xVM Server available next month.

After a lengthy consideration, the Simple Public License (SimPL) has been added to the list of approved licenses. The concern was that because the SimPL is a reciprocal license, it could create its own ghetto of code unusable by any other project. However, because it contains language that allows relicensing under the GPL v2.0 or v3.0, this will not happen.

To address the questions that have been coming up frequently regarding the X.Org Server and the plans to stop using HAL, Sun's Alan Coopersmith has created a new Wiki page called XorgHAL.

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased.

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.

Canonical Ltd. announced the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition for free download on Thursday 24 April. In related news, Canonical also announced the simultaneous release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition.