SGI FreeB and FLOSS

The FSF published a news flash about SGI's update to their FreeB license, to version 2.0. Whereas the FSF were aware of the issue since January 2008, our team here at Novell had pinpointed this issue numerous times back as far as 2005. The FSF wrote:

In January of 2008, software code at the heart of GNU/Linux 3D applications was discovered to be non-free—a potential disaster for free software advocates hoping to see advanced graphical acceleration now common on modern operating systems.

The new version of the license is in the style of the MIT license - one of the most liberal licenses available. As such, SGI has made their contributions to projects GPL compatible (the X11/MIT license is compatible with every version of the GPL). This is definitely good news. Thanks to SGI.