"Development of OpenHAL, a wireless network component for Linux, can now resume unfettered after months of legal uncertainty. OpenHAL allows people with wireless cards based on technology from Atheros Communications, Inc. to connect to networks using solely free and open source software."

I recently read the discussion on the GCC development mailing list related to GCC's transition to GPLv3. Despite generating 172 emails, the transition was quite smooth actually.

"Web 2.0 companies are largely built upon Open Source software. But how many of them do you consider significant contributors to Open Source? [...]and with the focus on APIs, instead of contributing code back to the projects you leverage, or contributing your own projects, cooperation has been limited..."

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.

"Many open source projects have been licensed under GPLv2, and while the open source world at large is on-board with free software and the ideal of free distribution, it is less concerned with the FSF's social movement to provide software freedom to all users. Consequently, most new features of GPLv3 address issues geared first toward protecting the rights of end users."

I see Intel has just released the previously-commercial-only Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under GPL v2. And this has reminded me of the complications Qt has brought up being v2-only, and it suddenly occurred to me that there's a way MS could bring a really sneaky anti-v3 strategy to bear.

In practical terms, developers use GPL v2 and GPL v3 if they want their software to be free and open and to remain free and open no matter how the code is used downstream. It can get more complicated than this, of course, especially since the copyright holder of GPL v2-licensed code, for example, can sell it and even use it in closed-source

"Red Hat's chief technology officer has maintained that an intellectual property agreement with Microsoft is not necessary for the company to enable interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."