Software Free

"For years now, Microsoft has either failed to implement or has actively corrupted a range of truly open standards adopted and implemented by the rest of the industry. Unless and until that behaviour stops, today's words mean nothing."

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian Project Leader in 2006 but was defeated by Anthony Towns by only six effective votes. In 2 [...]

John Spencer talks to Tim Pearson Chief Executive of RM. RM is the largest
most successful supplier of ICT to the UK education market and, for good measure, is British too. Tim has been there from the start and so is really now Mr RM. This autumn he gave the school ICT world a jolt when RM announced its Asus miniBook. It retails to schools for only £169 and runs Open Source software throughout. The miniBook has preceded an ava [...]

Copyrights and licenses are not the most interesting subjects in software development. Unfortunately they cannot be bypassed, they have to be confronted. The free and open source software movement has always had a legal side which is working on this. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has released a guide called A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (via Bruce Byfield). However, it might take some time to educate yourself through this 45-page monster. Meanwhile, know that by default every work gets copyrighted. If you want your work to be reused, just pick a license, any license.

Share

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would [...]

ITPro 15/02/2008:

Merely weeks after warning its shareholders that it's Unix litigation against Novell and other vendors may leave them with nothing, SCO late yesterday revealed it had received a potential $100-million (£50.8-million), private equity bailout offer..[from Stephen Norris & Company Capital - SNCP]

Groklaw 15/02/2008:

It's a takeover, whereby they give SCO $5 million, a [...]

An acquaintance of mine was detained by Homeland Security. His recently expired US visa landed him in the detention center in Tacoma, WA, where he had no legal counsel for 6 weeks:

read more

Need to know the landlord laws for your state? Want to find incorporation forms for your home business? The Public Library of Law, a new search engine launched in collaboration with legal research...

The U.K. is looking to change copyright laws that make it illegal to copy music for personal use and for libraries to archive material under copyright.

Groklaw: I was reading some cynical documents just filed in the LANCOR v. OLPC litigation. Yes, it's begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it.

Advertisement:

read more

softwarefreedom.org: The Software Freedom Law Center today announced that it has settled the GPL violation lawsuit filed on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against Xterasys Corporation.

Advertisement:

read more

How well is ODF and OOXML supported in different languages? I started off by choosing six common languages used by application and Web developers, then I went and looked for what libraries are available for each document format

10 Vote(s)

Jeremy Allison, Samba coder and Google Linux evangelist, looks at past and present efforts to bring standards to computing. Specifically, he looks at Microsoft's attempt to fast-track its Office Open XML file format through the ISO standardisation process. Read on for Jeremy's musings...

13 Vote(s)

Now I'm not quite sure what to make of this at the moment but a United States-based Nigerian-owned company has sued OLPC for an alleged patent infringement about multilingual keyboard technology.

13 Vote(s)

Against the backdrop of cries from the GNU/Linux community, Asus has taken steps to correct the availability of the source code for its Eee PC.

15 Vote(s)