BusyBox developers agreed to end the GPL lawsuit against Verizon, which was filed by the Software Freedom Law Center. Verizon distributes BusyBox in devices that are provided to Verizon by Actiontec Electronics, Inc.. Under the agreement, "
Actiontec has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Actiontec and its customers, including Verizon, of their rights to the software under the GPL".

As read on The 451 Group

Although there's no trace of a formal announcement, the Affero GPL is now an OSI approved license. The Affero GPL requires that you share your code changes whatever distribution channel you use: software as a service, or traditional software distribution. This is particularly important as more and more software is offered as a service on the web.

Read more on The Open Road and the Mobile Open Source blog from Funambol.

With version 3.0 of its suite, OpenOffice will make the switch to the GPLv3. There's also the move from the Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) to the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), easing the hosting of source code of extensions. Let's hope it will help solve some problems of the past.

As seen reported by The 451 Group.

Matthew Aslett, from The 452 Group, brings a short analysis of the power of the GPL and BSD licenses for software makers. The reasoning is that the fact that BSD allows anyone to add proprietary bits makes it easier for competitors to overtake the main developer of the project. Worth reading if you plan to publish your software under an open source license.

When using a Free or Open Source project in a professional environment, you'd better check you understand and respect the license. But a project can be dependent of other projects, with each using a different license. You also have file-based licenses. Dealing with licenses is one problem that Fossology.org software wants to ease solving. Once installed, you can upload a package to it, and it will analyse the package and give you access to lots of data it found, notably the licenses used in the software. As shown in the demos, it lets you identify the file subject to a specific license, or list all licenses used for files in a specific directory.

The Fossology software is available for download under the GPLv2 license

The Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) were accepted by the OSI board, as the consensus was that these licenses respected the 10 OSI criteria of the Open Source definition.

Now comes the question: which software will Microsoft publish under one of these 2 licenses?

This week, Microsoft gave access to the source code of the .Net Framework Libraries, under the Microsoft Reference License. By reading this short license, it's clear that it's far from free or open source: it grants you a read-only access and prevents you from redistributing the software outside of your organisation... Actually, developers of the Mono project (the GPL licensed software providing the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on multiple platforms) are urged to NOT look at the source code, although characterising Microsoft's move as a trap might be exagerated.

It's worhty to note that Microsoft apparantly has a long history of granting access to libraries' source code.

SugarCRM has announced that they're switching to the GPL v3 for the Sugar Community Edition 5.0, due to be released in september. Earlier version are available under the Sugar Public License (based on the Mozilla Public License), and a FAQ is available about the change.