OStatic

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.

This post by Dan Kusnetzky highlights one of the things that open source and free software projects have to contend with: Free isn't enough to carry the day.

A key challenge faced by any open source project is getting mindshare. Itﾒs a truism that if decision makers donﾒt know about a product, they wonﾒt consider it. If they donﾒt consider it, theyﾒll select other approaches. There are too many people shouting out their own Xen messages.

The developers of PHP announced last week that PHP version 4.4.9 is now available. This would not be remarkable in and of itself, except that the developers also indicated that this would be the last release of PHP 4.4. If PHP were commercial software, its end of life would be cause for panic in some quarters. The end of life of an open-source project works differently, of course. It does mean that the official development group will no longer spend time and energy fixing bugs in these old versions. But that's where the similarities between proprietary and open-source software ends.

The term open source was supposed to remove confusion, and was deliberately chosen to emphasize what the software is, rather than what it isn't. The good news is that when the term open source was coined, just 10 years ago, the world was ready to listen, and incorporated this term into its vocabulary. The bad news is that the open source world is now so diverse, with so many licenses and commercial interests involved, that it is often hard to know whether a program is truly available on an open source basis without reading the fine print.

The Software Freedom Law Center just announced its fourth victory over a software company that incorporated GPL-licensed software in its proprietary product. What happens when the SFLC sues a software company, and how can proprietary software vendors best work with the open-source world? The answer depends, as always, on the license.

Despite continued infighting between the Free Software and Open Source communities, the OSI has blessed the new AGPLv3 license.

Late last week the AGPLv3 license (Affero GNU Public License) formally completed the OSIﾒs (Open Source Initiative) license review process. The AGPL license differs from the ubiquitous GPL license in a number of important ways, the biggest of which closes the so-called ﾓASP loophole.ﾔ