http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:20:35 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/21592/The_Fight_Over_Open_Source_Leeches_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21592/The_Fight_Over_Open_Source_Leeches_/ InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' -- companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:28:39 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) GNU, GPL, Open Source 31 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News snydeq http://www.osnews.com/story/21543/Ex-Microsoft_Employee_Free_Software_Will_Kill_Microsoft/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21543/Ex-Microsoft_Employee_Free_Software_Will_Kill_Microsoft/ Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model. Fri, 22 May 2009 13:58:19 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 147 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News shaneco http://www.osnews.com/story/21343/Red_Hat_Maps_Open_Source_Activity/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21343/Red_Hat_Maps_Open_Source_Activity/ Red Hat today published a new study together with Georgia Tech mapping open source activity across 75 countries. Officially called the Open Source Index (OSI), the final score is made of a number of factors including policies, practices in the Government, Industry, and Community. Topping the list current is France with a score of 1.35. Spain is second at 1.07, Germany third at 1.05. Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:10:58 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 7 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21306/Stallman_Discusses_Free_Software_GPLv3/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21306/Stallman_Discusses_Free_Software_GPLv3/ On June 29, 2007 the Free Software Foundation released the GNU General Public License, version 3. What happened since then? Federico Biancuzzi had the opportunity to discuss many subjects with the FSF's founder and president Richard Stallman. Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:38:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 48 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21192/ESR_GPL_No_Longer_Needed/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21192/ESR_GPL_No_Longer_Needed/ Eric S. Raymond is one of the three big figures in open source, together with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. During a talk for the Long Island Linux User Group, he made some interesting statements about the GPL, namely that the GPL is no longer needed due to the way the open source movement works. Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:02:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 80 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News google_ninja http://www.osnews.com/story/21189/Stallman_the_Javascript_Trap/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21189/Stallman_the_Javascript_Trap/ Richard Stallman, frontman of the Free Software Foundation, has shifted his attention towards web applications. "In the free software community, the idea that non-free programs mistreat their users is familiar. Some of us refuse entirely to install proprietary software, and many others consider non-freedom a strike against the program. Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or non-free. But browsers run other non-free programs which they don't ask you about or even tell you aboutâ€"programs that web pages contain or link to. These programs are most often written in Javascript, though other languages are also used." Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:58:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 27 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News google_ninja http://www.osnews.com/story/21131/_TomTom_Can_License_FAT_Without_Violating_GPL_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21131/_TomTom_Can_License_FAT_Without_Violating_GPL_/ The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information. Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:28:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 48 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21053/Muglia_Open_Source_To_Permeate_Microsoft/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21053/Muglia_Open_Source_To_Permeate_Microsoft/ Even though some believe that Microsoft's recent patent lawsuit against TomTom is a prelude to an all-out legal assault on Linux, that doesn't stop Bob Muglia, the company's president of Server and Tools Business, to look into the future and state that Microsoft's products will look more and more to open source software. In fact, he predicts most Microsoft products will have open source in them at some point. Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:27:56 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 42 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News http://www.osnews.com/story/20851/FOSDEM_2009_Interviews_Published/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20851/FOSDEM_2009_Interviews_Published/ Fosdem 2009 takes place in Brussels on the 7th and 8th of february. Just like in previous editions we have collected a list of interesting interviews with our main track speakers: Rob Savoye (Gnash), Martin Odersky (Scala), Pieter Hintjens (OpenAMQ), Victor Stinner (Fusil), Simo Sorce (FreeIPA v2), and Max Spevack (Fedora). Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:17:29 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 0 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News Elise Huard http://www.osnews.com/story/20740/FSF_SGI_Cooperated_to_Resolve_Licensing_Issue_in_X_org_Mesa/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20740/FSF_SGI_Cooperated_to_Resolve_Licensing_Issue_in_X_org_Mesa/ Thanks to SGI, a potential disaster for Free software purists has been averted. Back in January 2008, it was discovered by the OpenBSD guys that some of the contributions to X.org and the Mesa 3D Graphics Library made by SGI were covered under permissive open source licenses that didn't fall within FSF's definition of Free software. The FSF Compliance Lab worked with SGI to resolve the issue, and they succeeded. Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:15:35 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 69 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News http://www.osnews.com/story/20489/State_of_Open_Specification_Hardware_Where_Are_We_Headed_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20489/State_of_Open_Specification_Hardware_Where_Are_We_Headed_/ It seems that Haiku hacker Francois Revol (mmu_man) posted a few messages to a thread in MSI's forums asking to provide hardware with open specifications and/or (non-GPL) FOSS drivers such that alternative operating systems like Haiku and others could benefit and be supported as well. His messages were seemingly squelched by a forum moderator as "rubbish" while other, pro-Linux, postings seem to have remain untouched. Francois decided to respond with a public blog rant of his own opinions regarding the state of open source driver support and vendors' responsibility to their customers. Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:47:07 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) GNU, GPL, Open Source 23 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News umccullough http://www.osnews.com/story/20485/The_Xiph_Org_Foundation_Announces_Theora_1_0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20485/The_Xiph_Org_Foundation_Announces_Theora_1_0/ Theora is a video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. While the Theora bitstream format was standardized in 2004 and our beta releases have been used by millions, this 1.0 release is an important milestone reflecting the maturity and stability of the Theora codebase. A number of leading multimedia web groups already support Theora. Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox, the world's most popular open source browser, will support Theora natively, as will releases of the multi-platform Opera browser. Top-10 website Wikipedia uses Theora for all of its video. Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:19:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Adam S) GNU, GPL, Open Source 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News Luis http://www.osnews.com/story/20446/The_Four_Biggest_Open_Source_Innovations/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20446/The_Four_Biggest_Open_Source_Innovations/ Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related. Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:14:32 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) GNU, GPL, Open Source 51 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News M-Saunders http://www.osnews.com/story/20171/Is_Microsoft_Trying_to_Kill_Apache_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20171/Is_Microsoft_Trying_to_Kill_Apache_/ When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that "Microsoft's sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft 'gets it' regarding the ASF" I had a fit of the giggles and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant. Gary Richmond explores Microsoft's motives. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:00:35 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amjith Ramanujam) GNU, GPL, Open Source 70 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News pas de calais http://www.osnews.com/story/20152/Why_Sharing_Matters_More_Than_Marketshare/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20152/Why_Sharing_Matters_More_Than_Marketshare/ Terry Hancock offers a detailed dissection of the critical difference between power and freedom when it comes to understanding why Microsoft and GNU/Linux respectively are playing different games - and freedom is the only game in town for the free software. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:16:26 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) GNU, GPL, Open Source 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/62 News pas de calais