The U.S. District Court in Washington will review on Sept. 11 the state of the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program, which is Microsoft’s program for licensing more than 200 proprietary protocols for server, storage and security services.

Microsoft's lawsuit against GPS navigation device maker TomTom set off a flurry of speculation about whether or not the company had forced GPL violating terms on 18 licensees of its FAT patents. If Microsoft followed licensing guidelines that were once published on its website, the answer is a clear "no."

"Yet another open source software provider has signed a licensing and patent agreement with Microsoft. The VAR Guy wonders: Is Microsoft moving a few strategic pieces into place before launching a legal showdown against Red Hat?"

Just two days before Microsoft and Novell signed a controversial deal in 2006, the two sides still hadn't figured out a way to make peace over Linux without violating the licensing terms that govern the open-source operating system.

Proprietary giant is licensing open source to its partners. What is going on?

Microsoft partners think it's great that the vendor has been aggressively battling software piracy. But some partners say the task of ensuring that their clients are in compliance with Microsoft's Byzantine software licensing structure is steadily growing more difficult.

Microsoft's licensing plans are a twisted knot of complexity that the company is trying to untangle.

In practical terms, developers use GPL v2 and GPL v3 if they want their software to be free and open and to remain free and open no matter how the code is used downstream. It can get more complicated than this, of course, especially since the copyright holder of GPL v2-licensed code, for example, can sell it and even use it in closed-source

A survey of 118 enterprise IT and development executives conducted by open source solution provider OpenLogic concludes that the "Open Core" model for open source licensing trails behind dual licensing and open source with commercial support, in terms of acceptability to the enterprise.