The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft. "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft," Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday. Update: The FSF claims this is being hyped.
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Member since:2005-07-06
What color is the sky on your planet? It would be nice to live in a world where programmers could concentrate solely on the code, but we don't. We live in a world of Rambus and SCO. We live in a world where slapping a lawsuit on a competitor is just as valid a tactic to gain market-share as releasing a great new version of a product.
Just because open-source projects are done voluntarily does not mean that they are immune to damaging legal tactics. The situation that tied up BSD for years wrangling with AT&T should be all the proof you need of the FSF's belief that free software needs strong legal protection. At the end of the day, Linux is competing with a convicted monopolist. Relying on their best intentions and neglecting to protect yourself is stupid, plain and simple.
Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2005-07-06
Having or not having gay marriage isn't something that impacts the protection of the community as a whole. A better example would be making a law that regulates the use of X-rays in machines. Before X-rays became widely used, such laws weren't needed. When X-rays were originally discovered, people used them very irresponsibly in machines, leading to numerous fatalities. Eventually, the government had to step in and set regulations.
This is analogous to the situation with patent terms in the GPLv3. Software patents weren't a major source of abuse 16 years ago when the GPLv2 was written. Now, software patents are a significant source of abuse, one one that is becoming more threatening over time. Again, IBM, Sun, and the Mozilla foundation all realized the importance of addressing software patents directly in the license. It's no surprise the FSF does too.
For everyone who thinks the FSF is alone in their thinking, try reading the OpenSolaris license sometime. The CDDL includes numerous patent clauses, and includes a termination clause that revokes your right to distribute a piece of CDDL'ed software if you claim patent infringement against the developer or any contributer to that software. This covers any patents at all, not just ones contained in the software in question.
Member since:2006-04-21
And in concecuense we will have more GPLv3 and less usuability in Linux, less formats for the user, forget about ipod compatiblity, etc, etc, and in concecuense less users meaning the dead of the main GPL project, Linux, companies can fork BSD or give to it more support, I say change all the software you can to GPLv3 and see how its popularity falls, just like GNUSense distro w/o the ability to use mp3, something users demands.
Actually, with top music companies experimenting with non-copy-protected MP3's and several European countries ruling that Apple's DRM is illegal, people engaged in the kinds of shenanigans that GPL3 is designed to prevent are soon going to find that the writing is on the wall anyway.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Member since:
2005-09-27
And in concecuense we will have more GPLv3 and less usuability in Linux, less formats for the user, forget about ipod compatiblity, etc, etc, and in concecuense less users meaning the dead of the main GPL project, Linux, companies can fork BSD or give to it more support, I say change all the software you can to GPLv3 and see how its popularity falls, just like GNUSense distro w/o the ability to use mp3, something users demands.