After years of hostility towards Free Software Foundation (FSF) licensing (here and here) Microsoft has announced the first in a series of PHP patches - and it's using an FSF license.

My name is Garrett Serack, and I am the Community Program Manager in the Open Source Software Labs here at Microsoft. I would like to extend an official invitation to the Apache Software Foundation to participate in the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Compatibility Labs here in Redmond.

A couple of weeks ago Google announced their WebM project, which provided a free software implementation of their VP8 video codec and a license to exercise the patents the company held on the software.

The Apache Software Foundation reached its millionth revision milestone today with a commit by ASF Member Yonik Seeley on behalf of the Apache Lucene Project. The all-volunteer ASF oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software, powering more than 130 Million Websites worldwide.

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

The open source Apache Maven project has been helping software developers for over six years with their project build and reporting management needs. For most of that time, the project has been offering incremental updates to the Apache Maven 2.x product line, but in the next few months, Maven 3 is set to emerge.

The Subversion version control system is now part of the Apache Software Foundation. The project cofinanced by Collabnet and the Apache Foundation announced at ApacheCon in Oakland CA that Subversion is officially to become an Apache project.

Apache Wink is a new framework for developing "RESTful web services". The project currently resides in the Apache Incubator, where newly introduced projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are matured and evaluated for promotion to full Apache projects, having entered the incubator in May.

When OpenOffice.org moves to a non-copyleft license, there's a ready replacement for people who want a productivity suite that does more to protect their freedom: LibreOffice.