Free Software Foundation News & Articles

In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang.

Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and eleven other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes fourteen defendants.

As the best-known free software and open source license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL, has become both a rallying point for the free software and open source (FLOSS) communities and a focus of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns for those who fear that these movements will destroy their revenue streams.

Let's take a look at some of the issues and misunderstandings that get in the way.

The rumors are true. Microsoft (news, site) has an official open source license that was approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) -- the Ms-PL, or Microsoft Public License.

Since they have licensed their latest offering ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under the Ms-PL, we thought we would take a look at the license terms. Is there an evil catch somewhere in the terms and conditions?