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".

If ultraportables were last year's big surprise success for GNU/Linux, one of the potentially exciting technologies for this year is the instant-on pre-operating system that loads in seconds when you power up a desktop or portable.

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.

Novell gets some new intellectual monopolies and Microsoft gets sued over patent infringement