The Software Freedom Law Center is pleased to announce that its client the Free Software Foundation has reached an agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc., settling the lawsuit filed by the FSF last December.

Today’s settlement between Microsoft and TomTom ends one phase of the community’s response to Microsoft patent aggression, and begins another. On the basis of the information we have, we have no reason to believe that TomTom’s settlement agreement with Microsoft violates the license on the kernel, Linux, or any other free software used in its products. The settlement neither implies that Microsoft patents are valid nor that TomTom’s products were or are infringing.

The Software Freedom Law Center, a New York based not-for-profit legal services organization that provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), seeks a registered patent attorney passionate about defending software freedom.

Today, SFLC, along with its client the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GCC Steering Committee, announce the release of a new GCC Runtime Library Exception. This license exception will allow the GCC codebase to be upgraded to GPLv3, and enable the development of a plugin framework for GCC.

SFLC was glad to advise FSF in its successful efforts to obtain full relicensing permission of SGI’s contributions to X.org. Now that the licensing has been clarified, all of the code 3D graphics under SGI’s older licenses are Free Software. SFLC applauds the work done by FSF, X.org and SGI on this matter, and especially commends FSF for their commitment to certainty in free software licensing.