If you’re serious about improving your company’s business practices, you probably want answers to some simple questions: “What’s important?” “What should I focus on and where do I start?” “What are best-in-class companies doing that I ought to be doing, too, and what can I learn from them?” That’s what the free Self-Assessment Checklist from The Linux Foundation’s Open Compli

"What's up with GPLv3? Hoping to clear up both confusion and FUD, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Compliance Lab will hold a public Q&A session on Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 2 PM (ET)..."

LWN has just published an article that examines the field of compliance engineering. It explores the tools and skills required to undertake due diligence activities related to licensing and binary code in the embedded industry. It is based on the GPL Compliance Engineering Guide, which in turn is based on the experience of engineers contributing to the gpl-violations.org project.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license compliance is a contentious topic. There are different perspectives about when and how license terms apply, about which licenses can be used together, and about how potential issues should be resolved. Veteran gpl-violations.org and FSFE contributors Armijn Hemel and Shane Coughlan examine the situation and what can be done to improve matters.

Oslo, Norway, 18 January - 2008 - Trolltech ASA is licensing its Qt cross-platform development framework under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3), with immediate effect.

Qt is already available under the GPL v2 and will continue to be so in addition to the GPL v3.

The GPL v3 license will make it easy and safe for free software developers to use Trolltech’s Qt with the most recent license framework from the Free Software Foundation. Trolltech hopes that its move will inspire free software projects to use GPL v3 when programming with Qt.

The free software movement's most important license -- version three of the GNU General Public License was unveiled by the Free Software Foundation late last month. It comes roughly 16 years after its wildly successful predecessor, GPLv2, became one of the most used software licenses ever. Today, approximately three quarters of the world's free software packages are distributed under GPLv2.

Dimdim calls itself the world's first free Web meeting service based on an open source platform. Users can share their desktops and files while chatting and videoconferencing with meeting participants.

"...This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC’s) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur.

Linux developer Matthew Garrett leads 6 other Linux copyright holders to Software Freedom Conservancy's free software license compliance program: "I'm glad to put my copyrights forward for this new initiative, and welcome any Linux kernel copyright holders who wish to join us to reach out to Conservancy via compliance@sfconservancy.org."