"Palamida is tracking adoption of GPL v3 on a special blog. The last post mentioned an incredible rate of adoption for it. There are already more than 2,000 projects using the license (or a variation of it, like LGPL v3), with a good chance to reach 5,000 by the end of the year. I feel we are about to reach the tipping point, when everyone will move from GPL v2 to v3..."
Read more »RIAA to help enforcing the GPL
Free/Iliad is a French Internet provider with a whooping €1B in revenues. Its founder Xavier Niel boasts being a very profitable business with all salaries representing only a few percents of Free’s revenues: a performance that might be better explained by the amount of open source leveraged by their massive infrastructure.
Read more »Freedom
"I attended an interesting talk by James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center earlier this week. The discussion focused on how the Free Software movement can now be regarded as a success and how others are now attempting to replicate this in other areas such as media (Creative Commons).
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Gartner et al Fixing the Price for the Entire Industry?
Earlier today we mentioned some of the latest FUD from Gartner, which was directed at the GNU/Linux server/desktop in particular. Always remember the Gartner-Microsoft connection and also remember how Microsoft views analysts.
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Free Software Isn't Shareware
There are a lot of people that confuse Free Software (and Open Source) with Shareware.
Though all three types Free/Open/Share may well be available for free (as in zero cost), there are some fundamental licensing issues that make them each separate and distinct.
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What is Copyleft?
"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.
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The GNU GPL: Free as in Will?
As anyone who has anything to do with [non-Windows] software development knows, GNU’s definition of “free” is “free as in freedom and free as in beer.” But what dictionary did the GPL author(s) use when looking up a definition for “freedom”?
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GNU General Public License considered very strong, still not challenged in court
You sometimes hear people trying to dismiss the GNU General Public License, the most popular of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, as being unenforceable. While there is a long list of companies that have been alleged to infringe the license, none of these companies seem to agree this license is unenforceable and opt to settle out of court rather than challenge the license.
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Biggest legal victory ever for GPL
For decades, almost no one challenged the General Public License in legal matters. In fact, no one has even dared to try to break it in court. That record remains unsullied as the biggest company to date--Verizon--that had been accused of a GPL violation opted to settle out of court.
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How The GPL Can Save Your Ass
The computer industry is now facing a huge challenge -- how to transition software to multi-core platforms. No amount of marketing or wishful thinking will help...Using the GPL will immediately remove issues that would normally choke such an important undertaking.
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Microsoft's Open Specification Promise: No Assurance for GPL
There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk.
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New lines of contention: Information Commons vs. New Enclosures
"...It is this intensive effort at the private appropriation of knowledge that has created different movements of resistance. The free software movement, the movements of farmers against biopiracy in seeds and animal and vegetal types, where Western corporations are privatizing the fruits of thousands of year of communal cooperation; the movement of patients and developmental organizations for access to reasonably priced medicines and medical knowledge; the movement for free access to scientific publications, are all related reactions to these New Enclosures.
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NDISwrapper and the GPL
"«A change after 2.6.24 broke ndiswrapper by accidentally removing its access to GPL-only symbols,» noted Pavel Roskin, offering a patch to address the issue. Linux creator Linus Torvalds was unimpressed, «I'm not seeing why ndiswrapper should be treated separately. If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols» [...] «Ndiswrapper itself is *not* compatible with the GPL. Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads modules that aren't is stupid and pointless. Clearly it just re-exports those GPLONLY functions to code that is *not* GPL'd.» [...] « So stop blathering. ndiswrapper has one purpose, and one purpose only: to load non-GPL'd code. So OF COURSE it shouldn't touch GPLONLY functions. »"
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The impact of licensing choice
Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:
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New license logos
"Let users know they're protected by GNU licenses. Have you released some software under one of the new GNU licenses? If so, you might be interested in our license logos..."
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