"Oh no!! GPLv3! Cancer. Infectious. Oh, wait. The sky is not falling, so why did Microsoft (and its many proxies) warn everyone?"

It seems as though Microsoft's anti-GPLv3 battle has been lost. Not only does the licence flourish on the GNU/Linux side, but it also appears to be invading Microsoft's own back yard -- Microsoft Windows. It might be just a matter of time.

The company has yet to decide whether it will license Script Start under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 open source license...

Of course, one reason why Microsoft fears GPLv3 so much is its effective way of handling and obstructing abuse of power over the user. Other factors include patent-related clauses that put an end to a malicious plan.

In other encouraging news, the GPL licence makes its way into hardware. In the long run, this can resolve Tivoization issues as well (modifiable hardware).

The success Sun Microsystems has seen from publishing the hardware designs of its Niagara processor is pushing the server and software company to continue its open source chip initiative, and release the source codes of its latest "Niagara 2" processor.

University of California gets a praise for its work.

Sun Microsystems has named the University of California, Santa Cruz as its first OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, establishing a collaborative partnership between the company and university faculty who work with the OpenSPARC community on the processor code first released as open source by Sun in 2006.

Sadly, Sun Microsystems announced that it would axe some jobs. The announcement came out yesterday, but no figures were disclosed. For quite some time, Sun has wrestled with the idea of strategic transition, but its move towards the GPL is gradual and slow. With licensing issues that came to light with the release of ZFS, people began wondering what Sun really meant by "open source".

Speaking of being 'open' (or pretending to be open), Novell and IBM are victims of such accusations. With their latest offer, which was mentioned here yesterday, came some interesting observations (a critique).

While the term “open source” was not actually used in the latest announcement, the connection is there to be made and any confusion does not hinder IBM’s cause. The same could be said of Microsoft choice of the phrase “Office Open XML”.

While IBM contributes more to the open source ‘ecosystem’, like Microsoft it is attempting to use open source as a foundation for selling more commercial products. If you’re going to discriminate against one for doing so, you have to discriminate against both.