The practice of selling license exceptions became a hot topic when I co-signed Knowledge Ecology International's letter warning that Oracle's purchase of MySQL (plus the rest of Sun) might not be good for MySQL. As the following article explains, my feelings about selling license exceptions are mixed. Clearly it is possible to develop powerful and complex software packages under the GNU GPL without selling exceptions, and we do this. MySQL can be developed this way too. However, selling exceptions has been used by MySQL developers. Who should decide whether to continue this?

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.

Stark law exceptions were intended to remove barriers to Health IT adoption, allowing hospitals to pay for hardware and software for Physicians.

Richard Stallman's willingness to accept the sale of exceptions to the GNU General Public License intrigues me. What intrigues me is not his acceptance of the idea. Rather, what fascinates me is how many people are reacting as if his comments are something new.

So far, with only a very few exceptions, the comments and discussion around my criticism of Ubuntu has been respectful and on topic, even when people strongly disagreed with me. This says something very positive about the Ubuntu community.

Women are woefully underrepresented in IT. With few exceptions, women represent less than 30 percent of the IT workforce in most countries, while comprising approximately half the workforce.

The issue of Polish institutions and public administration in general, being dependent on closed-source software providers, the main one being Microsoft, is largely spoken about. There are exceptions among the institutions however, and one of them will be featured in our today’s article.

"...here is a list of the top 10 reasons that anything (and probably everything) related to Java sucks ass in comparison to Ruby and Rails..."

With a few exceptions, K3b keeps feature-parity with 1.0 series, but it also introduces a number of new features. Perhaps the biggest among these is support for Blu-ray drives. Additionally a lot of work have been put into improving the overall user experience. Some work-flows have been merged abstracting it for all kinds of media.