Free Software Foundation to unveil new GPL Version 3
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The latest GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) software license will officially be released Friday -- but not without some controversy.
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Boomshakalaka A GNU General Public License (GPL) test case in the US looks dead in the water after a start-up promised to abide by the GPLv2 rather than duke it out in court with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).â¦
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This afternoon, Microsoft confirmed to BetaNews it has added three sets of APIs and protocols to its intellectual property portfolio, for availability to corporate developers and other partners between now and next June.  Itâs generally not a free license, but the intention is to give partners who do have the intention to build on these protocols a way to do so, without Microsoft giving away secrets to its competitors.
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(InfoWorld) - The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. Although the earlier GPLv2 has been used with Linux, GPLv3, released by the Free Software Foundation June 29, presents problems, according to James Bottomley, gatekeeper of the Linux Kernel SCSI Maintainership, which governs disk storage access in the kernel. The Linux kernel is not owned by any one person; it is owned by all the people who submit patches to it, Bottomley said. This means the kernel is now owned by anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 people, he said. "In order to change the kernel, we'd have to get everybody who owns the kernel to sign off on the re-licensing," said Bottomley, who also is CTO of SteelEye Technology and a member of the Linux Foundation board of directors. This would be required under copyright law, he said. This presents obvious practical problems should the keepers of the kernel decide they want to move to GPL v3. "We'd have to find all of the owners, first of all," Bottomley said. The lack of a compelling advantage to GPLv3 "means we're not going to bother," Bottomley said. A plebiscite could be announced to decide the issue, but a code contributor still could object to any switch, said Bottomley. "The choice at that point would be to rewrite their code or abandon the process," he said. The GPLv2 and v3 licenses are incompatible, he said. The Linux kernel will stick with GPLv2 for the foreseeable future, Bottomley said. Previously, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds has objected to GPLv3 because of concerns that digital rights management stipulations in the new license would be burdensome. The Free Software Foundation did not provide a response to Bottomley's claims on Thursday. The founder and president of the foundation, Richard Stallman, has advocated migrations to the new GPLv3 license for free software, emphasizing improvements in such areas as digital rights management and patent protection. Microsoft posted a statement on its Web site Thursday that said the company is not a party to GPLv3 and that none of the company's actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of the license. The company also said it assumes no legal obligations under GPLv3. "While there have been some claims that Microsoftâs distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law," Microsoft said. "In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future," Microsoft said. Under a multifaceted agreement with Novell, both companies agreed to not sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues; Microsoft through the arrangement can sell Novell subscription certificates for Suse Linux. Microsoft has decided the support certificates will not entitle the recipient to receive support or updates relating to code licensed under GPLv3. The full statement can be found here.
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Ziff Davis - After 13 years, the Free Software Foundation will update the GPL, and the to-do list is a long one.
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Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.The project stems from governance work done in-house at HP, according to the Web site set up for the project.&quot;We needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open-source project was licensed,&quot; a statement on the site reads. &quot;Rather than simply collecting a project&#39;s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.&quot;FOSSology is available under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2 and currently has support on most GNU/Linux platforms, according to the site.It is not clear from the site how HP plans to make money through the initiative. A company spokeswoman declined comment and said Friday that more details will be announced next week.Companies like Black Duck Software are already in the FOSS-tracking business.HP&#39;s entry brought a warm welcome from Black Duck CEO Doug Levin. Levin may feel HP&#39;s involvement will help the market expand overall. &quot;We can now officially welcome HP to our market,&quot; Levin wrote on his blog . &quot;FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.&quot;Right now, the FOSSology project has modules for license analysis, MIME type identification and for extracting metadata, according to the site.The site said the tool already generates detailed results: &quot;More than simply reporting, &#39;Package X uses license Y,&#39; the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package.&quot;FOSSology&#39;s analyses aren&#39;t foolproof, however, a statement on the site concedes: &quot;In general, the analysis results are very good guesses but should not be considered authoritative. (Or to say it simply: We&#39;re not lawyers. The code tries its best, but leave the legal decisions up to your own attorneys.)&quot;Over time, FOSSology is meant to be far more than an open-source license tracker, according to the site. Future capabilities could address bug fixes and patches, security alerts, and code reuse, as well as analysis of all types of software.The effort prompted praise on Friday from Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;It&#39;s free and open source, which is nice,&quot; Cote said. &quot;So if the data is reliable and well-fed, it could be of help for people who don&#39;t want to work with Black Duck ... and others who have commercial ways to scan for open-source licenses.&quot;&quot;The interesting thing will be to see how open the resulting data is and how much reporting people do with it,&quot; he added. &quot;There&#39;s a sort of cloudy idea of how much open source is used in the enterprise, and having more accurate, free numbers would be great for the community, and more importantly, enterprises that want to get a feel for how widely used open source software is.&quot;The availability of free open-source usage data &quot;will help people make much better -- and affordable -- decisions about what open source to use and not use,&quot; Cote said.
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InfoWorld - The Free Software Foundation has released the fourth or &quot;last-call&quot; draft of the third version of its GNU general public license, set a date for its official publication, and laid out reasons why the free and open source software community should adopt GPLv3 sooner rather than later.
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InfoWorld - Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.
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GPLv3 is either manna from heaven or fire and brimstone, depending on the survey you read.
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Microsoft has revealed that its patent deal with Linspire doesn&#39;t cover the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the company&#39;s latest effort to distance itself from the GPLv3.
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On Thursday, the free software world saw a first. The Software Freedom Law Center announced that it filed the first-ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients.
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Linux looms large in software shifts in India. Plus: Version 3 of the GPL gets a long-awaited release.
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The fourth and final draft of version 3 the Gnu Public License is released by the Free Software Foundation. The GPLv3 addresses issues central to the debate over patent protection and undermines further patent-protection agreements.
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Looking to avoid the costly fragmentation that stifled the Unix market, members of the Free Standards Group have announced a new version of a critical Linux standard that many of its proponents hope will cement the future for the open-source operating
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Linux gets its latest kernel update and a real-time makeover; debate continues on GPL changes.
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The Free Software Foundation will release GPLv3 at 9am Pacific on Friday, the group said this week. The event ends a contentious 18-month process that pitted several key open-source players against each other.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has three different posts to his blog about the releases of new versions (or new software) he's posted recently - a new release candidate for GD, the new Hidef extension in PECL, and a bug release for the zip extension.    The first post concerns the Zip extension release and which of the provided libraries you should use with your PHP installation (he recommends the latest PECL version over the included version). There's also a link to the new release - 1.8.6 The second post is an announcement about the publishing of the Hidef extension into the PECL library. It can be used to do a "one time declare" of constants in your application, working with a configuration file to only load them the first time the browser hits the site/application. Finally, in the newest of the posts, Pierre points out a brand new release candidate for GD 2.0.35 to two possible correct race conditions. You can download this new release here: tar.gz file, tar.bz2 file