OpenSourceLegal.org

An article about a medical software product that was released by its founder under open source, but the company is now challenging it.

In discussing the recent Novell agreement, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft has been quoted (by Todd Bishop at Seatllepi.com) saying “. . . Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders.” He gave no details.

Sun has announced that it is releasing Java under GPLv2.

As has been widely reported, Microsoft has apparently entered into an agreement with Novell regarding interoperability of SusSE Linux and Window.

This (a tacit admission of the important of Linux) is potentially a major development for Microsoft, and it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org) has apparently won another court action in Germany, this time against D-Link for use of Linux in a network attached storage device. An english translation is available here.

A discussion draft of a new Free Documentation license (v2) has been posted by the Free Software Foundation.

In case you missed it, there is another case involving the GPL perculating through the legal system: IChessU vs. Jin.This is a case in Israel that commenced in late 2006 and relates to a chess program that was published under the GPL, and allegedly incorporated into a product not released under the GPL. Details about it (posted from the plaintiff’s perspective) can be found here.

A set of Linux Kernel Developers has apparently posted a position paper criticizing the proposed GPLv3 draft.

The Free Software foundation has posted a clarification of its positions on the GPLv3 which appears to be directed to this position paper.

This is an interesting article regarding the choice between various open source licenses.

Richard Stallman has criticized the OSDL patent project as being insufficiently aggresive because it only seems to address "absurd" patents as opposed to those which lack clear prior art.