Free fonts have been released under a variety of licenses. As the Free Software Foundation points out on its license page, standard FOSS licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) are not really designed for fonts.

"So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge [...] In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses.

In the last 24 hours I implemented Licenses validation, whitelisting, masking and database support to Entropy. When I started, I tried to find out if someone (maybe crazy like me?) had already made a list of free (as in freedom and/or beer) software licenses. I didn’t dig too much and decided to have a look at /usr/portage/licenses. OMG, 811 licenses to read!

"Dear Mr. Frey, Your letter about our recent change to the GFDL, which lets operators of some GFDL-covered wiki sites relicense their contents under Creative Commons BY-SA license, raises the important questions of whether this change and the way we made it were proper, and what they imply in regard to trusting the FSF's stewardship of our licenses in the future..."

"A new license exception will allow the entire GCC codebase to be upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework for GCC..."

I'm happy to announce that Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata now accompanies all of the GNU licenses. This provides a great new tool that developers can use to raise awareness about the free software license they use for their work, and that users can use to find the software they're looking for.

Change. That's the word on the tips of everyone's tongues this year. One change everyone should consider is making the switch from expensive, proprietary software to open source.

"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.

One good thing about Linux system is that you can change almost every single aspect of the system. Dislike the dull wallpaper? Change it. Not happy with the default splash screen? Change it. Getting bored of the default panel? You can change it as well.