When OpenOffice.org moves to a non-copyleft license, there's a ready replacement for people who want a productivity suite that does more to protect their freedom: LibreOffice.

"...In the GNU Project we usually recommend people use copyleft licenses like GNU GPL, rather than permissive non-copyleft free software licenses. We don't argue harshly against the non-copyleft licenses—in fact, we occasionally recommend them in special circumstances—but the advocates of those licenses show a pattern of arguing harshly against the GPL..."

Licensing is something that F/OSS programmers talk about a lot. There’s two major categories of licenses: The GPL, aka Copyleft Permissive licenses,...

Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

Google has granted a license for a recently granted MapReduce process patent to the Apache Software Foundation for the Apache Hadoop open source framework for distributed computing

Combining freedoms and copyleft in the Gnu GPL license (invented by Richard Stallman) was the cornerstone of free software. This is now questioned due to the proliferation of incompatible copyleft licenses.

[...] However, it's ultimately hypocritical to claim support for a copyleft structure but oppose GPL enforcement. If you believe the license should have a legal requirement that ensures software is always distributed in software freedom, then why would you be surprised — or, even worse, angry — that a copyright holder would seek to uphold users' rights when that license is violated?