Linux's file system check utility fsck is little recognised and largely unloved, no doubt because it seems to know whenever you're in a hurry to boot your machine. Then - and why is it only then? - it starts doing what it was designed for -

"... they were afraid to run fsck for several months". That little sentence fragment was part of a support email I received this week. I've heard similar things in the past. The fear is that fsck will "make things worse".

Tell me, is anyone of significance -- besides the Samba Group for its CIFS (Common Internet File System) Windows-compatible file and print server program, and the license's creators, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) -- going to adopt the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License Version 3)?

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.

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.

"The Free Art license is the English language version of the Licence Art Libre, a French copyleft license for works of art. Created in July 2000, it is the first free license, in the spirit of the GNU General Public License, dedicated to works of art..."

A game I reviewed a while back, TeeWars has updated to a newer version 0.40 along with the updated weapons physics and gameplay comes a new name, TeeWorlds, and a new License. This was followed quickly by a bugfix release 0.4.1 a few days later.

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

The FreeType library is released under a dual license: you can choose either the FTL (FreeType License) or the GPL, version 2. That means that a software stack that uses FreeType has to be license-compatible with one or the other (or both).