* License Change We are pleased to announce that the ICU projects are changing to the X open-source license. This change is at the request of many people involved in major open source software projects such as Linux, Perl, and Gnome. It allows ICU to be incorporated into a wide variety of software projects using the GPL license. The X license is non-viral, allowing ICU to also be incorporated into non-open source products. The license change is effective starting with release 1.8.1 of ICU (ICU4C) and release 1.3.1 of ICU4J. These are update releases of ICU that add very substantial performance improvements over the previous versions, especially when determining the sort order for text in different languages. For details, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/press.html * New Releases We are also pleased to announce the ICU (ICU4C) 1.8.1 release and the ICU4J 1.3.1 release. For ICU (ICU4C), the major improvements include collation bug fixes and performance improvements as well as a normalization bug fix. For details see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/1.8.1/ For ICU4J, the updates include a normalization bug fix and new, normalization-related tools. For details, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/releasenotes.html Best regards, The ICU team
