"Paris, Jan 26th - The European Parliament's committee for legal affairs (JURI) voted the Medina report on Copyright last week. This report goes against its initial objective to account on the failure of the 2001 copyright directive. It only contains ridiculous repressive measures dictated by the entertainment industries, and goes as far as denying the Commission's ongoing studies.

An Indymedia server was seized by police in Manchester. This comes after somebody had posted the address of the judge in the SHAC trial on Indymedia, leading to Kent Police requesting that the IP address of their author be divulged. Because Indymedia don’t log the IP addresses of people publishing on it, they couldn’t help police with their enquiries.

The licensing of the Qt toolkit has perhaps been one of the great sagas of the Open Source world. It was Qt's proprietary license — and KDE's reliance on Qt — that led to the creation of the GTK-based GNOME Desktop Environment in 1997.

Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) will add an LGPL licensing option for Qt 4.5, due to ship in March. Together with a new policy of opening Qt source code repositories to the public, the more permissive license option should increase the cross-platform GUI application framework's popularity, says the company.

"Last week, I asked Karl Fogel, Canonical's newly hired Launchpad Ombudsman, if Launchpad will use the AGPLv3. His eyes said “yes” but his words were something like: "Canonical hasn't announced the license choice yet".

IconThanks to SGI, a potential disaster for Free software purists has been averted. Back in January 2008, it was discovered by the OpenBSD guys that some of the contributions to X.org and the Mesa 3D Graphics Library made by SGI were covered under permissive open source licenses that didn't fall within FSF's definition of Free software.

Legal experts chime in about what's really behind the Free Software Foundation's legal action against Cisco, and what it means for the industry.