Reader Brad sent in a fascinating post from a little while back by Steve Streeting, a software developer who created an open source 3D rendering engine called OGRE. In the post, Streeting describes his evolving view on open source licenses.

So I talked about licenses. And license obligations. And interesting bits of the GPL version 2. There’s one clause of the GPL version 2 that I’d like to single out because it’s one that is surprising to me — and rarely mentioned. Clause 6.

In France, the GPL has scored yet another major win in court. What makes this infringements case special is that it was filed not by the developers of the infringed-upon code, but by users, demonstrating that they, too, can successfully enforce the GPL.

According to the change notes for the current development branch the next release of the GIMP image editor will be licensed under the GPL3 and LGPL3

The saga of the GCC runtime library has been covered here a couple of times in the past. The library's license is a legal hack which tries to accomplish a set of seemingly conflicting goals.

Launchpad, a Web application developed by Canonical for managing software development, was finally open-sourced last week.  But with a number of its other products remaining proprietary, what are Canonical's real intentions towards living by the free-software ideology that drives projects like Ubuntu?

Contributing to projects that use more permissive licences than the GNU GPL means that it is likely that many will not contribute because of their distaste for free riders.

I'm happy to announce that Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata now accompanies all of the GNU licenses. This provides a great new tool that developers can use to raise awareness about the free software license they use for their work, and that users can use to find the software they're looking for.