OStatic

The KDE project has announced the date and some detail regarding its first annual Camp KDE event. This developer conference was conceived at the KDE 4 Release Event that took place earlier this year in Mountain View, California, and aims to get developers all over the world more involved in the KDE project.

On previous occasions it's been mentioned that it takes very specific behaviors for the Free Software Foundation to file suit against a company for violating the GNU GPL license.

Today, the FSF let Cisco Systems know in no uncertain terms that line had been crossed. The complaint centers on the Linksys brand routers, and the firmware used on those products.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.

Joe Zonker Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager, announced this morning that openSUSE 11.1 RC1 will not only sport new features and bug fixes, but a new license. The openSUSE release is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2, with the included packages retaining their governing licenses.

Previously, openSUSE installations required an agreement with the terms of the distribution's license. With the 11.1 RC1 release, the license text will be displayed at installation so that the user is aware of the license, but clicking I agree won't be necessary. Brockmeier says that this licensing is based on Fedora's license procedures, and that work is being done to clarify trademark guidelines in openSUSE to make redistribution easier.

Matt Asay at CNET directs readers to Glyn Moody's take on the Gartner Group's findings that 85% of enterprises are using open source software.

The Gartner numbers seem positive, and encouraging -- especially in light of the acknowledgement that the remaining 15% are planning to move toward more open source software in the near future. Then Gartner drops the bad news -- cases that Moody says don't end badly (they are usually remedied with a polite phone call) or even happen terribly frequently (12 or so cases a year) -- that 69% of companies have no formal method of evaluating and cataloging their open source applications, leaving them at risk of intellectual property liabilities.