We now know what happens when big hairy software coders work with big hairy lawyers. The result, understandably, is anything but slick. Meet GPLv3, the free software movement's latest legal tool to keep their code from being fenced in.
---Read on an empty stomach

How can anyone make a living writing Free software? Why should a coder work for free? These questions, and others, are answered in this two-part series. Today we learn why Free and Open Source software are very important even to end users who are not coders.

Patent lawyers and software giants whom they are representing (also lawyers that become patent trolls) jeopardise emerging companies, almost all of which do not want software to be patentable

It’s been a crazy week. We’re still pushing to make the Fedora 12 final release on time but without compromising on quality. It’s been a little hairy over the last two days but we’ve got what we think is a solid package set in at last, and a first release candidate build has been cut.

RMS: "That is completely backwards. The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one. 'Choose based on technical criteria first of all' is the opposite of what we say. [...] The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages. Its intended result is a coherent operating system. It is particularly important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU packages. For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr..."

One of the favorite arguments for free software is that it avoids lock-in to a particular manufacturer’s products. Something similar happens due to choice of programming language, though, which accounts for the sometimes-baffling project rivalries in the free software world.

Lawyers in Europe strive to net some extra money by promoting "interoperability" (with software patents) rather than making use of open standards

Some of us will find some kind of alleged spare time on our hands over the next few weeks. Certainly, there's often some kind of break from "work" over the festive season. Traditionally free software developers have used such times for long coding sessions, get-togethers and "hack-fests".

The FSF is launching a new advocacy campaign, and we'd love to have you involved. One of the most important tasks for us at FSF is to help foster the understanding that free software is crucial to a free society, and that citizens should switch to free software at home and in their own work, for freedom's sake.