In light of the recent GPL compliance complaint made by the Free Software Foundation against Apple's App Store, which sells and distributes software for Apple gadgets, it was probably inevitable that other problem applications would surface.

Copyright assignment can be ethical, and can unify a project under common ownership, or it can be misused to impose control and bypass the GPL, indemnify the code against patent infringement, and subvert the developers' intent in contributing to an 'open source' project.

According to data presented by DiBona, Google's Open Source programs manager, the GPLv3 license now represents more than half of the GPL licensed code that Google hosts on its Google Code site. What DiBona's data shows is that developers are embracing GPLv3 and using it for their project in growing numbers.

[…] this does result in the paradoxical situation that the GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.

"Within the framework of the author’s copyright that protects literary and artistic works, a growing number of authors choose to make their works available to the public with contracts of a very specific type called free licences. These licences allow anyone to distribute or perform copies of the work.

Aquaria has gone open source under the GPL! Now all four of the games that pledged to open in the Humble Indie Bundle are officially open source — the others are Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture. I am especially excited about the modding possibilities for Aquaria because of its excellent level editing tools. Here’s a video showing an early version of the editor:

Apple's action in the face of GPL violations speaks volumes about the company's attitude