"The Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) has been around in one form or another since the Gnu manifesto published by Richard Stallman in 1985. The free software movement founded at that time has not simply created the most successful copyright licence ever, it has acted as a guide to other, similar movements..."

"I have always said that open source software developers must be able to take advantage of [the 2004 ruling]: now they can," the Commission's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes boasted in a press release.

Public sector and Open Source Software (PS-OSS), a report commissioned by the EU Commission addresses the question : What would be the potential impact on the development of the Information Society if public organisations (administrations, research institutions, universities, agencies, public companies) were to release software fully owned by them under a Open Source licence?

"Nearly five months after the release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has completed the updating of its key licenses by the release of the GNU Affero General Public License (GAGPL). The GAGPL is designed for use with software distributed over a network, such as a Web application or software as a service..."

Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin. Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), one of the principal advocacy organisations on open source software, has unanimously approved the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) version 1.1 as an open source licence, on 4 March.

Samba project leader Jeremy Allison has accused Microsoft of trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public Licence, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals.

For the past 26 weeks I've been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I've received a few pieces of mail saying this is a'non-free' licence and questioning my use of it here.

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced.