Qt, the C++ programming framework behind KDE, will be licensed under the terms of the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt 4.5 release, in addition to their standard GPL and commercial licenses. They are also pleased to announce that they are going to open up the Qt source code repository and also make it easier for the community to contribute to Qt.

Liferay, makers of the portal software, are moving from licensing their code under the MIT(X11) licence and switching to the LGPL

Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) will add an LGPL licensing option for Qt 4.5, due to ship in March. Together with a new policy of opening Qt source code repositories to the public, the more permissive license option should increase the cross-platform GUI application framework's popularity, says the company.

Out of all the free and open source licences which are available, there are two which are disproportionately chosen by FOSS developers when licensing their software. Those two are the GPL and the LGPL. Of these, the GPL is disproportionately favoured over the LGPL.* If there are issues with GPL implementations then there are IP issues with OOXML. Any assurance that excludes implementation under these licences is just cause for the FOSS community to voice concern.

Alfresco has announced that it is changing the licensing of the community edition of its enterprise content management system from GPL to LGPL. The move was announced by the company's CEO, John Newton, in a posting on his blog.

Dossia a consortium of companies for "Lifelong Personally-Controlled Health Record" has announced that they will be using the LGPL (a FOSS license) licensed Indivo personally controlled health record software for Boston's Childrens Hospital Information Program (CHIP)

So we all know that most open source projects are licensed under the GPL - Ken Krugle's graph shows that clearly over 75% of projects are GPL or LGPL - but it turns out that most open source software used by enterprises are not licensed under the GPL … companies are using primarily Apache licensed software!

The PySide team is pleased to announce the first public release of PySide: Python for Qt. PySide is a project providing an LGPL'd set of Python bindings for the Qt framework.

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all?