Red Hat on Monday said all of its newly initiated open-source projects that adopt GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1 licenses will be expected to include the GPLv3 "cure" provision. The move follows Red Hat's announcement last November, in conjunction with Facebook, Google and IBM, that the four companies intended to extend the GPLv3 violation …

Following five years of hectoring, Tesla has released a portion of the open-source code it's obligated to provide under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Since 2013, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), responding to complaints of GPL violations related to software in the Tesla Model S, has pressed the …

Oracle appears to have open-sourced DTrace, the system instrumentation tool that Sun Microsystems created in the early 2000s and which has been beloved of many-a-sysadmin ever since. As noted by developer Mark J. Wielaard, this commit by an Oracle developer shows that something is afoot. Big Red recently listed DTrace as one …

A few days before the Christmas holiday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) made a peace offering of sorts in an ostensible effort to resolve its trademark dispute with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). In September last year, SFLC sued the SFC claiming that the SFC trademark "Software Freedom Conservancy" is …

Linux kernel security biz Grsecurity's defamation lawsuit against open-source stalwart Bruce Perens has been dismissed, although the door remains open for a revised claim. In June, Perens opined in a blog post that advised companies to avoid Grsecurity's Linux kernel security patches because it might expose them to claims of …

Facebook, Google, IBM, and Red Hat on Monday will give free-software license violators two months to mend their ways before going nuclear. The tech giants, which release a fair amount of GNU-GPL-licensed source code, have committed to extend the GPLv3's 60-day "cure period" to license compliance errors under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 …

Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman and several other senior Linux figures have published a “Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement” to be included in future Linux documentation, in order to ensure contributions to the kernel don't fall foul of copyright claims that have already seen a single developer win "at least …

Chinese drone company DJI has removed hot-patching frameworks discovered in its apps by hackers – and is beginning to reveal GPL-licensed elements in its code. Informed sources told The Register the latest versions of DJI’s Go app, which is the mobile app used for controlling the firm’s drones in flight, have had JSPatch and …

A question mark over whether the GNU GPL – the widely used free-software license – is enforceable as a contract may have been resolved by a US federal judge. In a California district court, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley refused [PDF] to accept what has been an uncomfortable legal precedent for the past decade. She ruled that …

Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig's bid to have VMware's knuckles rapped for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has failed, for now, after the Landgericht Hamburg found in Virtzilla's favour. The Software Freedom Conservancy backed Hellwig when he alleged that some of his contributions to the Linux kernel …

BMW has sent Terence Eden a DVD containing GPL-licenced code used in its electric i3 model . Why should you care? Because Oxford resident Eden last month inadvertently caused something of a global stir when he pondered the quality of the i3's software and the security of BMW's update mechanisms. Along the way he noticed that …

Proceedings have begun in the German case probing whether VMware's ESXi is in violation of the Gnu Public Licence The case emerged last March, when ace kernel developer Christoph Hellwig alleged that ESXi hypervisor has pinched parts of the code he wrote for the Linux kernel. That's a big no-no under version 2 of the GPL. So …

Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year. SFC said that VMware had filed its defence against the suit brought by German kernel developer Christoph Hellwig back in March, which alleges VMware's …

Code-sharing website GitHub has grown so popular that it and open source are practically synonymous for many developers. But new research shows that most of the projects now on GitHub are released under license terms that are unclear, inconsistent, or nonexistent, leaving their legal status as open source software uncertain. …

Robert Rosario, the developer behind the open source document management tool Mayan EDMS, has pulled the development code of the software from public repositories. He claims it's being pinched by folks who use it in ways not allowed by the GNU Public Licence. In a Google+ post, Rosario says he works hard to make the software, …

Updated One of the principal authors of version 3 of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) has spun off his own version of the license without the participation of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in a move that could ruffle feathers in the often-cantankerous free software community. The new license has been dubbed GPL.next, and it' …

The US Navy has signed off on a $27,883,883 contract from military contractor Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones. The contract covers the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 beginning to install Linux …

Most, but not all, open-source apps are being welcomed by Microsoft into the Windows 8 Windows Store. The Store’s App Developer Agreement (here) allows developers to build their apps for download and installation on Windows 8 machines using any open-source licence as long as it has been approved by the Open-Source Initiative ( …