What? is in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was liberal.And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is commercial.

The Software Freedom Law Center, an organization focused on protecting open-source and free software, has filed copyright lawsuits against two U.S. companies, alleging that they are redistributing software in violation of the GNU GPL (General Public License).

IBM's move to develop its own suite of productivity applications to compete with Microsoft's Office software is part of a larger war the two companies are waging in the market for employee collaboration applications.

Although technology companies like to say they can revolutionize any business, many blue-chip vendors have concentrated on selling only to certain businesses: the biggest ones.

MySQL AB has made it harder for developers to use the enterprise edition of its database software for free, sparking a debate about whether the company has strayed from its obligation to its open-source community.

Jimmy Wales buys Look Smart's Grub search engine and secures it under an open source license for a public release later this year. Wikia Search will rely on Lucene, a Java-based open source indexing and search library that powers search services at sites like Digg and Joost.