Finding the GNU General Public License (GPL) too restrictive with regard to derived works, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai is working on an alternative license that will allow people to take commercial benefit from work derived from an open-source program.

Dr. Stallman in his article Free but shackled - Java Trap expresses his concern that Java developers may be unknowingly falling into an expensive trap. In his own words: If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing. By the time you find this out, you may have been using them for months, and redoing the work could take more months. You might say, "It's too much work to start over." Then your program will have fallen into the Java Trap; it will be unusable in the Free World. This is baloney, plain and simple. The statements are wrong on multiple counts. Richard Stallman> If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing. Sun-only features are clearly marked and are strongly discouraged to use by Sun. In case you didn't notice they are also in packages under com.sun.* or sun.* or sunw.* (package name starts with com.sun. or sun. or sunw.). Even extensions to Java, which are not part of the core is identified by placing them under javax hierarchy. The sun.* packages are not even in the source zip file (src.zip). Moreover Sun packages are not even documented in the API documentation, making them harder to find, let alone use. In fact they aren't documented anywhere. To use them you have to actually open the source code in src.zip, where available, and in most cases decompile the class files from rt.jar! And then make sense of them. There is no way a developer can mistake them for standard Java software/classes. If he is using them then he is making a conscious decision.

Mozilla Foundation has updated both Firefox and Mozilla suite to fix two critical security vulnerabilities in the code.