Many open source licences are only two or three paragraphs long and read more like a manifesto than a traditional software licence.

Debates about the pros and cons of various licences available to free and open source software developers often end up generating more heat than light.

We are writing to express our opposition to the proposed acquisition of MySQL as part of the larger merger between Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation.
Oracle seeks to acquire MySQL to prevent further erosion of its share of the market for database software licenses and services, and to protect the high prices now charged for its proprietary database software licenses and services.

"Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the K Desktop Environment project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to single organisation or person.

Code from 1985 under an old Sun licence and included in glibc has been re-licensed by Oracle America under a BSD licence

Lawrence Lessig: « These questions have been the challenge of Stallman's life.Through his works and his words, he has pushed us to see the importance of keeping code “free.” Not free in the sense that code writers don't get paid, but free in the sense that the control coders build be transparent to all, and tha

Respected Free Software lawyer, Eben Moglen and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre ) have sent a letter to the European Commission saying that it believes that the Commission has "underestimated the robustness the GPL has consistently demonstrated".

For the past 26 weeks I've been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I've received a few pieces of mail saying this is a'non-free' licence and questioning my use of it here.

Your editor wishes to take no position on whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems should be allowed to proceed by the European Union. Such a decision certainly involves a number of antitrust considerations which go beyond the free software community. That said, some of the positions being taken around this acquisition shine an interesting light on how parts of our community work.