Phelps portrays Microsoft as desperately striving to adapt to a new world of aggressive enforcement of intellectual property (IP), but ends up suggesting a rising IP hegemon eager to shape a new world of such enforcement. It's not pretty.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) recommends that projects using GPL version 2 upgrade to the newer GPL version 3. One of the features of GPLv3 is better protection against possible patent threats than its predecessor.

When the reforged GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPLv3) was finalized and released to an expectant public on June 29, 2007, the most important decision may have been one postponed.

"The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) [...] A vote will be administered to the Wikimedia community in order to decide whether to impl

Microsoft's current FAT file system licensing program could hobble the development and free distribution of GPL-licensed software, says an open-source legal advocate. However, licensing terms that were once published on Microsoft's website, which have since vanished, would have been compatible with the GPL.

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, the C++ programming framework behind KDE, will be licensed under the terms of the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt 4.5 release, in addition to their standard GPL and commercial licenses. They are also pleased to announce that they are going to open up the Qt source code repository and also make it easier for the community to contribute to Qt.