Google makes rare books available for free, protects the environment, and gives grants to many non-profit organizations.  But in at least one respect, the company may not be so generous; General Public License (GPL) author Eben Moglen feels Google should contribute more to the open source community.

Microsoft has announced that they’ll be suing open-source software companies, developers and even users for patent infringement—on 235 patents.

Adobe hopes to attract more developers to their Flex platform by releasing its SDK under terms of the Mozilla Public License.

While the stock market has minted a few tech people as billionaires, including the richest geek on the planet, the most successful in the open source movement probably won’t touch the same level of wealth.

I’ve been catching up on some reading and found the comments to a post from Dana very interesting.

Here’s a summary (although the comments are worth a read):

By now, you’ve probably heard about or read Mark Shuttleworth’s view on keeping free software free. Matt Asay has a take on Mark’s post here.

Major corporate houses choose open source partly due to the economic gains and mainly due to the control the open source system gives to their hands.

Matt Asay has some good advice for folks asking him for career advice: “Work for an open source company.”

Monday’s announcement by Linden Lab that the software you run on your computer to interact with Second Life will be opened up to anyone who wants to contribute to its future development generated wide-ranging commentary in the media and among bloggers.

Alex Fletcher has a nice list of hypothetical new year’s resolutions for the open source community.

The odds are good that the LAMP stack is running somewhere inside your company.

Interesting news that Linden Labs have open sourced the Second Life client source code under GPLv2.

Red Herring’s Falguni Bhuta predicts “More (Open Source) momentum in developing countries“:

In November, Sun Microsystems moved to “open source” status for Java, after a decade of maintaining proprietary status for the portable programming language.

Version 1.3 of the Google Web Toolkit has been released, and it’s completely open source. While that may not seem remarkable in and of itself, it’s part of a bigger plan: “To radically improve the web experience for users . . .”

My thesis advisor keeps reminding me to frame the question correctly, otherwise the experimental results will be meaningless.

Today at Le Web 3 in Paris we launched Socialtext Unplugged, the offline wiki.