This guide presents a practical guide to ensuring GPL-compliant code, especially in embedded devices.

"Today Loohuis Consulting (LoCo) has released the first version of its comprehensive GPL Compliance Engineering Guide. LoCo is one of few companies in the world that offers commercial GPL license compliance engineering services.

"...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.

A friend pointed out to me that the Free Software Foundation's "Practical Guide to GPL Compliance" has some intriguing details. One, in particular, caught his eye.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is perhaps best known as the distro whose owner Novell, in 2005, signed an extremely unpopular patent-protection deal with Microsoft. From that moment on, Novell was essentially dead to those that prize the free software aspects of Linux.
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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.

The Software Freedom Law Center last month released a guide to help businesses avoid compliance issues with the GPL and LGPL, "Practical Guide to GPL Compliance". The purpose of the guide is to help businesses avoid litigation over the GPL.

Novell released SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) at the same time it rolled out SLES 11. We found that the desktop bundle (which we tested on an HP EliteBook 2530p notebook system) includes features that render a look and feel similar to past versions of Apple's MacOS as well as some parts of Windows 7 beta we've tested.

The slow, toe-in-the-water approach by PC makers to the Linux desktop continued on Wednesday, with Dell (NSDQ:Dell) and Novell (NSDQ:NOVL) formalizing a deal to ship Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 desktops preloaded with Novell's SLED 10, to commercial accounts in China.