Stories about: RMS

The number of open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License Version 3 has grown to more than 2,000, according to Palamida, which sells software and services for tracking open-source code within a customer's code base.

The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations.

Microsoft Thursday rejected the idea that its deal last year with Novell ties it to the new General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) and said it will not support any software distributed under the just-released open-source license.

A controversial update to the GNU GPL (General Public License) is set to be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation, a representative of the organization said on Tuesday.

Microsoft believes that Linux and open source software violates 235 of its patents and it wants violators to pay up. The company for years has been bashing the open source community and this latest move may well be the bloodiest battle yet.

There are some people who are passionate about the differences between "free software" and "open source." I'm beginning to wonder if the difference matters. The term "free software" came into use at about the same time that Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT, launched the GNU Project, and began writing the software that would eventually become the core of the free software community: emacs, the GNU "C" compile (gcc), the "C" libraries, and a few others.

Here is the response in full, posted Monday anonymously at Groklaw.net. The original question had been, " I have been curious about the Free Software movement, GPL and similar movements, licences for some time. I would like to read more about its history, specifically any history or information concerning the conception and drafting of the GPL itself."

Caldera Systems, Inc. d/b/a The SCO Group v. International Business Machines Corp. is the first case I could find that involves intellectual property and Linux. At the heart of SCO's complaint are allegations that IBM signed a license to study and use SCO's source code to improve IBM's AIX and that IBM's release of SCO source code to developers has harmed SCO. This is the first time anyone has claimed in a state or federal court that proprietary intellectual property has found its way into Linux. What does this case mean to Linux? Let's find out.

Not long after the second part of the most recent Perens interview went online, we got email from Larry McVoy. He said there were some factual errors in the Perens piece and asked what our policy was on corrections. We assured him that we always tried to make corrections when they were needed and asked what the errors had been. He pointed out two: Perens' claims that BitMover (McVoy's company, which produces BitKeeper,) had trouble making payroll and that McVoy was constantly threatening to sue him.

Here it is, just as promised. This is the conclusion of the Perens extravaganza begun last week. This week's column is made up of excerpts from my conversation with Perens two weeks ago. The conversation followed no set course. My questions were not pre-ordained; they wandered over the Linux terrain like it was a cow-path. But Perens' responses were lucid, well-informed and very interesting. I have trimmed and edited the conversation a bit in order to pack as much of it as I could into this week's space.