There's been a suggestion of a shift towards open source in the houses of government in the UK recently, with the Conservative Party promising to promote open source if elected and the incumbent Labour Party releasing the code behind its new carbon footprint calculator under the General Public License.

UPERTINO, Calif. (July 25, 2007) - SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the most widely used free and open source (FOSS) license in the market.

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength. The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

After 18 months of widespread consultation with community and corporate interests, the third versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) were released one year ago on 29 June 2007. In November, they were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).

KnowledgeTree™, the leading provider of Open Source document management software for small to medium-sized organizations and departmental users, today announced the availability of KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition 3.5 licensed under the new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.

The most surprising thing about George Osborne's recent Open Source announcements was the lack of backlash.

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

The Green Party of Canada has included Open Source Software in its election platform. How long until a major North American party follows suit?

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.