At last week’s GPLv3 conference, the topic of embedded GPLv3 software came up a few times. Below is something of a summary of those discussions. Georg Greve blogged about the conference, so I’ll avoid repeating what he covered. Suffice to say, it was an event the organisers can be proud of, and Tokyo is a Read more »
FSFE’s Freedom Task Force was announced on Monday …an announcement slightly overshadowed by SUN promising to GPL Java. What is FTF? Shane Coughlan – our main FTF guy – will publish more information on this in the next few days, but there is an explanation here: http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/ And there’s more info in the press release Read more »
Two positive aspects of choosing the GPL for Sun’s Java are that it is a copyleft licence, and that it means Sun’s project will be able to share code with the GNU Compiler for Java and GNU Classpath. Sun have released under version 2 of the GPL, but have said that they will consider version Read more »
In a November 1st interview, Richard Stallman was asked for his thoughts on if Sun free Java (as they have done today). Below is a transcript of that section of the interview. The whole interview his at the following URL: http://mirror.linuxquestions.org/pub/archive/tllts/tllts_165-11-01-06.mp3 [50:35] Interviewer: the last time we spoke, you mentioned two projects that you were Read more »
I wrote an editorial for LinuxDevices: How GPLv3 Tackles Licence Proliferation It’s meant as a discussion primer for what can be done in the GPL to remove reasons for people to write new licences, and to ease the problems created by new licences – such as licence incompatibility. The third discussion draft is due out Read more »
While the deal is being analysed for GPLv2 compliance, it’s a useful example of a more general case worth thinking of regarding GPLv3. The problem to be considered is: what if company A distributes some GPL’d software, and company B announces that they will not sue customers of company A. This creates a situation where Read more »
Friends in Ireland have been working for a while now on making a 100% free software GNU+Linux distro. The idea of making fully free distros seems to have started with UTUTO-e. Soon after, there was talk of Canonical working on "GNUbuntu", but the rumour didn’t materialise and a parallel non-Canonical project began. That was later Read more »