Open Source Archive

Plenty of loud argument has ensued over whether binary-only drivers belong in an operating system based on open source philosophies. David Chisnall examines the reasoning on both sides.

Linus Torvalds had harsh comments about the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation to help it draft version 3 of the GNU Public License. However, so far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree with Torvalds' assessment that the FSF isn't listening to feedback.

The second draft of the GPL version 3 license is not even a few days old and already one of the largest Linux vendors in the world is taking issue with its content. "HP had hoped that the second draft would clarify the patent provision such as to ease concern that mere distribution of a single copy of GPL-licensed software might have significant adverse IP impact on a company," said Christine Martino, vice president of Open Source And Linux with HP, in a statement. "Unfortunately, the concern lingers in draft 2." The first draft included some contentious terms surrounding DRM and patents; those terms have softened a bit in the second draft. Apparently, not quite enough for HP.

Red Hat's Havoc Pennington wrote a very interesting article on his blog about open source, services and GPLv3. In the piece Havoc argues that sometimes having open and unrestricted services is more important than having the actual source code. He raises the question about how the open source community can move towards a model of open services; he specifically wonders how to finance the associated deployment and maintainance costs. Havoc believes that the GPLv3 fails to address the issue of data access and focuses too much on source access, which he thinks becomes somewhat irrelevant in the growing "software as a service" world.

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business.

When organising the 3rd international GPLv3 conference, FSFE got the whole 2 days recorded and have now put the video and audio files online. There are also full transcripts, including the Q and A sessions of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

It's time for the Windows and Linux communities to drop the religious war and get together in a hurry to put the strengths of each operating system to best use, according to a nationally recognized authority on Windows Server. At the same time, Microsoft has been reaching out to the open-source community to try to find ways to overcome the incompatibilities between software distributed under the GNU General Public License and its own commercial software.

After Kororaa announced its GPL problems and me writing a column about it, the people behind Kororaa have now posted an in-depth follow-up: "I have been receiving lots of information which I have been sorting through, thank you to everyone who has emailed me (although I would have also thanked you personally via email). I contacted both ATI and nVidia for some clarification on particular issues, however neither have answered my questions. Nevertheless, this is what I have found so far."

"We have received an email claiming that the Kororaa Xgl Live CD is in violation of the GPL. I have been researching this as much as I can, asking many prominent people in the Linux world for their opinion. So far, no-one has agreed with the email, however a few have said to seek legal advice, which I cannot afford to do (but can't afford not to do, if I want to continue the Live CD). As such, the Live CD has been put on hold, until I can sort this out. If I cannot sort this out I will be forced to cease work on the Xgl Live CD."

Coverity has released the results of a Homeland Security Department-funded bug hunt that ranged across 40 popular open-source programs. The company found less than one-half of one bug per thousand lines of code on average, and found even fewer defects in the most widely used code, such as the Linux kernel and the Apache Web server.

Two years ago, on April 1, 2004 an article appeared here on OSNews titled "Will Open Source Come to the Rescue?" Two years later, I am proud to report that there is indeed an effort to bring open source software to the Emergency Service community. I would like to take this time to tell you what has transpired in the past two years.

"Community has always played a central role in the Open Source landscape, and the term 'community' is bandied around almost as much as 'Web 2.0'. Unfortunately, as with 'Web 2.0', the term 'community' has become a vague descriptor for a collection of principles that represent similar things. As more and more disparate groups and organisations make use of any definition, meaning tends to be blurred by the exceptions to the rule."

Microsoft extended an olive branch to the open source community with the launch of Port 25, but visitors to the Web site have been treating the branch as if it were poison ivy. Port 25 is a Web site that offers a look into the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. Launched in 2004, the lab is the software company's attempt to test interoperability between Microsoft software and open source solutions. Its other stated goal is to make IT professionals with UNIX/Linux skills more proficient in the Windows environment - and vice versa.

When Sun trumpeted its 'open source DRM' last month, no one at first noticed an unusual name amongst the canned quotes. Lending his support to the rights enforcement technology was Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and Software Freedom Law Center director, Professor Lawrence Lessig. A name usually associated with the unrestricted exchange of digital media. Debian activist and copyright campaigner Benjamin Mako Hill noticed, and thought this was odd. "The fact that the software is 'open source' is hardly good enough," he wrote, "if the purpose of the software is to take away users' freedom - in precisely the way that DRM does." And on a related note, here are some photos from inside the FSF headquarters in Massa Massat Mass.