At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing -- especially among projects in its core community of GNU platform development. This article explores why commercial projects pick particular open source licenses and what might happen in the future.

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In my blog post last week, as well as showing a cool video of Ubuntu for Android in action, I asserted that open source makes the perfect foundation for innovation. A sequence of news releases about open source desktop productivity suites have shown up over the last few weeks to add to the assertion. With this amount of energy, open source suites are looking more and more like interesting alternatives to Microsoft Office.

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An old idea about open source -- that it's all about cheap knockoffs of proprietary ideas -- has been turned on its head. Today's open source communities, where it's easy to build on the work of others without constantly seeking permission, offer the most fertile soil for seeding new ideas and growing innovation.

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A debate has raged for months about open source licensing trends. It all started with assertions that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is rapidly falling from favor as an open source license, replaced largely by the Apache License. Free software advocates couldn't disagree more.

What's really going on? To understand the answer, you need to know a little background.

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At the end of last week, Microsoft quietly released unexpected news: the launch of a wholly owned subsidiary to engage open source projects. All the reports stuck to the facts the new president of Microsoft Open Technologies, Jean Paoli, was willing to disclose in a blog post.

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Cloud computing has been described by some of the more radical thinkers as a profound challenge to the heart of software freedom. There's some justification to this accusation.

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April 16 sees the start of the court case between Google and Oracle over Android's supposed unlicensed use of Java technology. The case has changed character substantially since it started. Originally a patent lawsuit of epic proportions, various forces of erosion have reduced Oracle's patent case to approximately nothing. What's left is a copyright case that at first sight had many people scratching their heads; the picture hasn't improved much with the passage of time.

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This week, an open source company -- Red Hat -- reported annual revenues of more than $1 billion for the first time. For the full fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $1.13 billion, an increase of 25 percent over the prior year. That's more remarkable than it may seem.

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Users are taking control, and there's no stopping them from bringing their own network-connected devices to the office. Today, every phone, every e-book reader, every tablet is a gateway to a world of networked computing. Even if you tried to prevent your employees from bringing them into the building, only military-grade security could stop them.

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Mark Cuban is no fool. A tech billionaire, the no-nonsense owner of the Dallas Mavericks is just the sort of person you'd expect to value software patents. So the title of his blog post this Tuesday, "I hope Yahoo crushes Facebook in its patent suit," may not look out of place to you.

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The open source community should feel a little safer from software patent attacks today. The Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of Linux contributors formed as a self-defense against software patents, has extended the definition of Linux so that a whopping 700 new software packages are covered, including many developer favorites.

Just one hitch: The new definition also includes carve-outs that put all Linux developers on notice that Phillips and Sony reserve the right to sue over virtualization, search, user interfaces, and more.

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February 2012 was a coming-of-age for the LibreOffice open source productivity suite. Multiple announcements show the project is well-supported and thriving. But what of the future?

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It's a challenge to sort through the maze of storage products to find a solution to your problem--but it's better than not having choices.

It's a challenge to sort through the maze of storage products to find a solution to your problem--but it's better than not having choices.

More U.S. consumers hold on to feature phones and dumb phones. Are U.S. carriers to blame?

More U.S. consumers hold on to feature phones and dumb phones. Are U.S. carriers to blame?

Solid-state storage is still expensive. Is it worth the benefits?

Solid-state storage is still expensive. Is it worth the benefits?

Vendors have bombarded consumers with conflicting information about smartphone costs, network data speeds, and features, slowing adoption and upgrade rates.

Vendors have bombarded consumers with conflicting information about smartphone costs, network data speeds, and features, slowing adoption and upgrade rates.