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Richard Stallman is a free software pioneer. As president of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the GNU Project, he is also an evangelist of a free society in which people have inaliable rights to run, study, copy and distribute software. As such, Stallman is often grieved when he reads new...

The Free Software Foundation released what many expected to be a controversial first draft of the GNU General Public License version 3.0 on Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Now it looks as though the draft may not actually be as controversial as some had speculated.

The Free Software Foundation is releasing the long-awaited first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Legal experts are already wrangling over the possible revisions to the most popular open-source license in the world.

The much-anticipated first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 will be released on Jan. 16 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. However, the draft may raise more questions than answers. In fact, the debate over the content and exact wording of the license has al...

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) this week released a document specifying the process and guidelines for revising the GNU General Public License (GPL). The FSF will release the first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) revision in January 2006. The GNU GPL is the most widely u...

Our system of law in the United States is what is called a "common law" system. When judges make decisions in such a system, they rely on what is called case law -- the written opinions on matters of law that are previously published by other judges. The other legal principal that lucky non-lawyer...

The open-source license covering the Linux operating system is scheduled to be released for public comments early next year, according to the Free Software Foundation. The public debate over General Public License version 3.0 is expected to include comments from 150,000 people around the world. The ...

People often ask me how likely it is that an open-source license like the GNU General Public License will ever be enforced. When they ask that, they usually mean: "If I violate it will I get caught?" It's a legitimate question, if one lays aside moral rhetoric, such as the idea that proprietary so...

In the face of a European Union threat to levy US$5 million in daily fines for allegedly failing to license selected software code, Microsoft today announced the expansion of its Shared Source Initiative to cover seven additional countries in the European Union. Launched in May 2001 and now encompas...

Motorola and Acer are among more than a dozen commercial software and appliance products vendors that have been accused of misusing software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Thirteen companies received an open warning letter at the CeBIT conference in Hannover, Germany, last week...

The debate over software patents is getting dramatic. For some, more than just lines of code are at stake. Rather, it is nothing less than freedom itself. As in the apocalyptic "Lord of the Rings trilogy," the armies prepare for war. The battle cry from Free Software Foundation Europe sounds: "Join...

The same group that said that free and open-source software was a bigger security risk than commercial software and also claimed that Linus Torvalds ripped off the Linux kernel plans to release a new report in a few weeks. Ken Brown, director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's technology pro...

It's nice to know someone is reading my column. According to some of your letters, it seems my recent column on the GPL touched a nerve. To my critics who referred to me by names other than Phil, I can only respond with an equally mature "Same to you!" For those who prefer a more reasoned discussion...

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, started a revolution over printer drivers. According to the official history, he couldn't get permission or source code to modify a printer driver to suit his needs, so he wrote the General Public License (GPL) and a compiler. Eventually,...

I love life and I love having choices. I guess you can say I am pro-life and pro-choice. Unfortunately, for most people those labels represent the opposing sides of a very divisive issue. The curious thing is that these terms are not really descriptive of the issue at all. In fact, unless you know...

Following the lead of the Apache Software Foundation, the Debian Linux group has announced it will not deploy the Sender ID antispam standard due to licensing concerns. The Debian project issued a statement on Saturday, noting that the group abides by a social contract to its users that specified al...

With a flair for the dramatic even Shakespeare might appreciate, commentator Larry Seltzer recently predicted that Sender ID -- a spam-filter technology some call the "king of the e-mail security mountain" -- would soon be history. "It's a tragedy," Seltzer wrote. "Microsoft's uncompromising licensi...

Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...

It's nice to know someone is reading my column. According to some of your letters, it seems my recent column on the GPL touched a nerve. To my critics who referred to me by names other than Phil, I can only respond with an equally mature "Same to you!" For those who prefer a more reasoned discussion...

Last week, I examined the nuances of a marketplace for licenses, and its relationship to a parallel marketplace for products that use those licenses. This time, for those readers who might actually be in the market for a license, let's review the one that gets the most ink -- the General Public Lice...