After an interesting free software licensing event in Helsinki, I got thinking about licence complexity. At the conference, people had two types of questions (a) Why didn't GPLv3 additionally solve X problem? and (b) Why is it so long?

I could feel it in my bones: the great victory of the EU over MS is a sham. Here's why.

Microsoft has now posted the revised licenses for interoperability as a result of the EU antitrust agreement. Microsoft calls them the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program License Agreements for Development and Product Distribution (WSPP Development Agreements). I don't know why they can't come up with better names. Probably for the same reason the Zune is brown.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

GNU Classpath hacker Mark Wielaard wrote about Sun's announcement to release an early access version of NetBeans 6.0 under a dual licensing scheme of CDDL and GPL v2 with Classpath exception.

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.

The Open Source Initiative approved on July 25 its first new license in quite some time: the Common Public Attribution License, which is essentially the Mozilla Public License with a new attribution clause.