It got little notice at the time, but Richard Stallman, the leader of the FSF, said at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo on Nov. 21 that the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement is not in violation of the GPL version 2. Stallman said, according to a transcript published by the FSF Europe, "What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone."

ReactOS, the open source implementation of a Windows XP/2003 compatible operating system, just published a new interview in their series of interviews with ReactOS developers. Today's interview features the main DirectX implementation developer Magnus Olsen.

The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.

In a posting to the Hula mailing list, Novell has stated that it is no longer providing full-time developers to work on Hula. Hula was unleashed in February 2005 to much fanfare. Things seem to have been quite recently, despite the news that iFolder and Hula would be combined into something called Maui.

Opera Mini 3.0 was released today (get it here). Major new features include camera support, RSS feed reader, SSL and https support, content folding, and speed improvements. Screenshot here. Today we also celebrate here at OSNews the first hits of the Opera-based Wii browser (via a proxy hack to allow generic web browsing) and the Sony PS3 browser. We would be grateful if you could snap a picture of your TV with your gaming console rendering OSNews and send us an email with it or post a link below.

Gnash (open source implementation of Flash) is now working on Haiku. "I've been busy porting the latest Gnash 0.7.2 release to BeOS this weekend. I did start this port as the other version that was apparently ported earlier this year never had a public release. I've achieved a full port that is using the AGG rendering backend and a native BeOS GUI. I also wrote a Firefox plugin based on my SVG plugin. The native BeOS audio handler is yet incomplete, which is the reason why I didn't release anything yet."