Tag Archives: gpl

Alfresco Decides Less is More: Switching to LGPL

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 2/1/2010
Alfresco is switching licenses, again. This time the company is switching the license for its enterprise content management system to the GNU LGPL, away from the GNU GPL. Alfresco's switch is possible because the company requires a contributor agreement to accept code into its repository. The agreement requires that contributors give Alfresco the ability to [...]
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Richard Stallman on GPL Exceptions

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 1/11/2010
Richard Stallman raised more than a few eyebrows when he signed the letter objecting to the MySQL purchase. Endorsing, or seeming to endorse, the practice of selling proprietary exceptions to GPL'ed software seemed entirely out of character with Stallman's comments on Free Software up to that point. To clarify, Stallman has written up an essay [...]
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The Unlicense: A License for No License

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 1/11/2010
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is often described as "Copyleft" because it turns traditional copyright on its head to make code freer than traditional proprietary copyright licenses. Taking that a step further, some developers are embracing the Unlicense, a license that "disclaims" copyright interest in a piece of code altogether. If the BSD, MIT, [...]
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SFLC Takes on Consumer Electronics Companies: Will it Help?

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 12/15/2009
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is taking the gloves off. The SFLC has filed suit against 14 companies, alleging that each of the companies violates the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). According to the complaint and media release issued Monday, "nearly 20 separate products" ranging from Blu Ray DVD players to LCD [...]
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RMS says GPLv2 isn't good enough to protect MySQL (but it is)

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 10/20/2009
I was surprised, to say the least, this morning to read Simon Phipps' tweet that "Richard Stallman and others declare GPL inadequate to protect software freedom." Lack of caffeine, maybe? Nope. Stallman and Knowledge Ecology International really have sent a letter to the European Commission saying that Oracle shouldn't be permitted to acquire MySQL in [...]
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Microsoft becomes a Linux kernel contributor

By Joe Brockmeier | Published: 7/20/2009
You read that right -- Microsoft has become a contributor to the Linux kernel. Microsoft and Greg Kroah-Hartman have posted about this in more detail, so I'd encourage you to go read those posts for the full details. The long and short of it, though, is that Microsoft has contributed roughly 20,000 lines of code [...]
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