In the most recent episode of the Software Freedom Law Show--released early for holiday travelers--Jeremy Allison talks about his resignation from Novell, the first time he discovered a GPL violation at Samba, and why complying with the license is pretty easy. "What I keep trying to get over, get across to people, especially corporate legal types, is 'We want you to use our stuff.

Most Americans expect that their laws are only passed after some period of public debate between Republicans and Democrats or their news-channel proxies. However, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) may be an exception to this rule, and if it is signed, many United States laws concerning the Internet and ownership of data may become substantively different.

European regulators extended their review of Oracle Corp's (ORCL.O) proposed $7-billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O), giving the software maker more time to address anti-competitive concerns.

Amid the fight against open standards, ODF 1.2 is coming and Microsoft is accused of “lying” about OOXML

Representatives from three European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.

ODF news from the past week, mostly positive this time around (no signs of sabotage from the Microsoft ecosystem)

Clear definitions are not an accident. They're born from knowing that rough statements (eg, "quite large" or "very very far") don't cut it. Of course we all know this... we're just puzzled about why someone on the European Commission would replace - at no one's request - the precise definitions of Open Source and Open Standards by this amazing abstraction called the Openness Continuum...