When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia’s patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat’s next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way?

Qt Software has made Qt 4.5 and the Qt Creator 1.0 IDE available for download. For the first time, Qt SDK is available, a convenient bundle of the two.

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.

"...Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license..." -- via GNU Affero General Public License

After 18 months of widespread consultation with community and corporate interests, the third versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) were released one year ago on 29 June 2007. In November, they were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).

In a blog entry posted yesterday, developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun's excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Yoshida invested a tremendous amount of personal time developing a sophisticated optimization solver module for the OpenOffice.org Calc program.