Open source project licensing

Whenever you decide to publish some code somewhere in the internet, you have to think about the license. For many of us not being lawyers, this is a rather random choice. Given what we've been told is best, we usually just use any GPL flavor or Apache, MIT or BSD and don't spend much time …

Getting the sources of your RPMs

According to the GPL, you have to provide the source code of any (GPL-licensed) software you distribute (i.e. package and publish). Traditionally, this is satified by Linux distributions in several ways. Like any other package management system, RPM metadata contains the URL of the upstream project that created the software. This is where the (unmodified) …

Opinions on Microsoft’s GPL’ed code

There's been much debate about Microsoft releasing code under the GPL lately. Linus Torvalds was intervied by the Linux Magazine, here's what he thinks about it. Also interesting is Greg Kroah-Hartman's related blog entry. According to him Microsoft simply had to comply to the GPL because they used Linux code (to avoid a lawsuit) and …