Summary: OpenSUSE does the right thing by actively distancing itself from Novell (and thus from Microsoft’s patent deal too)
ON ABOUT a handful of occasions in the past (e.g. [1, 2]) we suggested that OpenSUSE should be forked or made independent. The reasons are simple; the two main ones are that Novell has a patent pact with Microsoft and Novell is up for sale (the intention of potential buyers is unknown).
A few days ago we wrote about OpenSUSE discussing the project’s direction and Ars Technicaargues that “autonomy from Novell” is on the agenda.
The developers behind openSUSE are drafting a new “community statement” as part of a broader effort to define a technical strategy for their project. The purpose of the community statement is to describe the kind of collaborative environment that the project wants to create as it refines its technical focus.
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The challenges are not insurmountable, however, and a foundation would definitely open the door for other vendors to take a more active role. Novell’s Michael Löffler wrote a blog entry last year in which he described the reasons why an openSUSE foundation would be desirable. He makes a case that openSUSE would benefit from having a vendor-neutral organization to encourage contributions from other companies besides Novell.
Michael Löffler’s suggestion seems reasonable, but there is still a trademark issue. Novell literally owns “OpenSUSE” and at the same time it pays Microsoft for deployments of SUSE (GNU/Linux or Ballnux) such as those from Microsoft’s partner Cray. Novell goes a long way to help Microsoft in HPC.
The third generation of the Cray Linux Environment, a goosed version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 that was originally expected only on Baker boxes and their Gemini interconnect, made its debut last month sporting a neat new feature called Cluster Compatibility Mode.
This is another example of Microsoft making money from domination of GNU/Linux in supercomputers, thanks to Novell. A lot of the code comes from IBM, Red Hat, and several other companies that contribute to Linux more than Novell (whose rank among contributors has declined since it signed the deal with Microsoft). Novell has moved back to a proprietary agenda (below we put some of the latest news from Novell), including Fog Computing and Microsoft-serving software like Mono and Moonlight. █
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[1] Deloitte Wins Novell Partner of the Year in the Identity and Security Category
Major vendors – full-function platform suites are being offered by IBM (Lotus), Microsoft, Novell, and now Cisco, which just announced its Quad product line. Novell’s special sauce is simultaneous document editing.
Summary: Latest updates about software patents, ranging from Microsoft and Apple to the impact on GNU/Linux users
For entertainment purposes only, see this new video titled “Software patents are dirty scum.”
Apple is once again attacking Linux using software patents. Shame on Apple. It is also part of the Apple vs HTC case and as Slashdot puts it:
Although Android is not mentioned in any of the court documents, many of the patent infringement complaints refer to the software rather than the hardware that HTC manufactures, leading to speculation that Google is the real target, especially considering that Android sales are surpassing the iPhone’s.
As the court documents (embedded below) show, Apple mentions four of its patents in the suit. However, two of them had already been included in the initial suit, and it appears like they are being re-included because of some minor corrections that needed to be made by the USPTO.
In other patent news, the software patents-loving Facebook is now at Amazon’s mercy due to Amazon’s latest outrageous patent [1, 2] (this week’s fantasies about overlap and duplicates do not take account of the scale and time required to avoid these). Some critics already use this as a demonstration of the failure of the patent system and software patents in particular.
Moving on a little, here we have VirnetX issuing a press release about the patent it used against Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. This news is mostly covered by Microsoft boosters who worry about the effects on Microsoft:
According to a new survey from the law community, the alleged link between patents and innovation is weak, but they still defend patents in their survey (they are — after all — in the field of law, not science). From the overview:
The first major survey of high-tech entrepreneurs finds that patents provide less incentive to innovate than popularly believed. A large share of software startups avoid patents altogether, finding it more critical to move fast to market. But patents do offer tangible benefits across industries by limiting competition, attracting financing, and increasing the chances of an acquisition or IPO.
Actually, prominent VCs beg to differ. They publicly say that they are against software patents in particular.
IMMI’s technology is a patented proprietary software platform that respondents download to their own smartphone or a smartphone provided to them. According to IMMI’s website, the phone randomly samples ambient audio in the room several times a minute, tracking exposure to TV, movies and radio. In addition, IMMI software monitors mobile web surfing activity and measures internet use.
As readers are probably aware, we wrote a lot of posts about WebM because it’s extremely important as a deterrent of patent aggression against GNU/Linux. LWN has made public its coverage on the subject, going under the headline “Swift and predictable reactions to WebM” and Linux Journal says that “Mozilla, Opera, and Flock Release VP8 Ready Browsers” (that sure was fast!)
The latest wares of three popular browsing applications were released this week reflecting a changing Internet. Open formats are taking center stage at Mozilla, Opera, and Flock as lock-in (or freeze-out), security concerns, and performance issues fuel the drive toward the VP8 video format.
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The VP8 codec reference implementation was open sourced by Google on May 19 and is regulated under a BSD license.
Now the tools are still in the proverbial Stone Age (those that are free) as it’s just been announced recently and you’ll need some tech savviness to get going. Of course if you’re a user of some of the services who have already begun to offer VP8 and WebM support, then you’re already ahead of the pack. I’ll list those services at the end of this article.
This hopefully makes the MPEG cartel simpler to ignore. YouTube may soon be MPEG-free, for those who wish for it to be that way. Canonical indirectly pays MPEG-LA [1, 2], but it really ought not to, at least in the long term.
Everyone is waiting for Bilski right now [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. It’s not just business method and software patents that boggle the mind these days. Here is another new article about gene patents. It’s titled “Myriad Gene Patent Litigation Goes Down Under” [via]
On Tuesday, June 9, 2010, several plaintiffs, including a breast cancer patient and a cancer advocacy group, sued in a Sydney, Australia federal court to invalidate Myriad Genetics’ patents on the breast cancer susceptibility genes BRCA-1 and 2. According to published reports and comments by Australian patent law experts, the suit substantially tracks the much-publicized one filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union. In particular, this suit is also a frontal attack on the Myriad patents, seeking a judgment that genes in isolation from the body are products of nature and thus not patentable inventions.
The factual background in Australia seems a bit different. Myriad has granted an exclusive license to perform BRCA gene tests to a Melbourne company called Genetic Technologies Limited, which is a co-defendant in the case. But GTL has been reported to have “gifted” its patent rights to health care institutions, and not to charge royalties. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs’ lawyers have expressed concern about the possibility of GLT exploiting their monopoly as in the U.S., where the tests cost over $3,000. They note that on two earlier occasions GLT sent letters to hospitals telling them to stop testing. A number of Australian sources have also worried aloud about the implications of the patents for medical research.
More patents lead to less innovation, contrary to what lobbyists and propagandists (like the guy shown below) tell legislators. Such weak arguments from them refer to no concrete evidence. Studies have shown repeatedly that software patents are harmful, unless one is a paranoid monopoly or a lawyer. █
Summary: New attempts are being made to push Mono-based software from Novell (falling outside the MCP and thus a patent liability) into Ubuntu GNU/Linux
* From: Didier Roche <didrocks ubuntu com>
* To: banshee-list <banshee-list gnome org>
* Subject: [Banshee-List] Changes planned in Ubuntu
* Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:35:57 +0200
Hey banshee dev/users,
as some of you know, Banshee is planned to be the default for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10.
The idea is to start the MeeGo interface per default, with some changes that I will push upstreamed as well (and hope you will accept them). Basically here is the summary of things that are needed and some I’m working on for default inclusion:
- HAL-free banshee:
the discussion already began with lamalex, alan and aaron. Apparently the branch should be reviewed this week for master inclusion.
- Meego interface by default:
This interface suit for UNE as it’s intended to be used on laptop. No impact on traditional ubuntu desktop as in debian/ubuntu the banshee-meego is a separate package (with an additional .desktop file). I have some tweaks (for now in bzr, but I will format them in git once I’ve finished to play the changes):
https://code.launchpad.net/~didrocks/banshee/une-modif. Those are doing:
* debranding (not in the code but in the display) replacing meego by netbook to be more generic
* starting only one interface at a time (thanks Bertrand!): either banshee (with $ banshee) or the netbook interface ($ banshee–client=MeeGo)
* quit on explicit shutdown request (still not close when clicking on the close button in the decoration bar)
* enable switching on the 2 interfaces. I think this is done in the good way: if you have the MeeGo interface installed, there is one additional button in the main interface to switch to the MeeGo one. And only one is showing at a time (that is to say, when you click on the switching button, you have either the MeeGo interface, or the traditional one)
- “ready to rock banshee”:
the idea is to minimize the amount of manipulation to be able to start listen music/reading video with banshee.
For that, avoiding prompting on first launch (do you imagine if every software you use prompt at startup) and enabling the plugin for import in ~/Music and ~/Video by default seems reasonable. Prompting is really a disruptive experience. It seems others distros are already doing that.
However, we have to show a way for people discovering the feature. It’s possible to show a status if the collection is empty (thanks Bertrand, again!) in the main interface to say “hey, your collection is empty, you can drop music there…”. If you look at the other conversion on the ML about showing things in status bar, I’m currently stuck at showing the same in the MeeGo interface, but that’s a detail.
Thoughts? Tell me things that can go upstream or not and I’ll prepare git format-patch for them.
Cheers,
Didier
Microsoft’s Community Promise (MCP) does not cover parts of Banshee, thus it’s a live patent trap.
People can politely oppose this move. It’s bad enough that MeeGo gets polluted with Novell products like Mono and Banshee [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and while Ubuntu is not a democracy, users of Ubuntu (myself included, having used it since the first release) have a freedom of speech/expression. █
Posted in Site News at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A few words on the site’s status after transitions, including a word on load balancing
WE RARELY report any site news anymore. We believe it to be a reducer of signal, but here is a quick note to say that the improved focus which places “Boycott Novell” as a campaign rather than a domain name has paid off. Netcraft now ranks this domain 1454th for traffic on the Web (nevertheless, it’s UNIX/Linux-oriented, whereas Alexa for example is very Windows/IE-oriented).
We would hardly manage to cope with server load had it not been for caching that was set up separately. Most pages are delivered without actually touching the CMS or the database, simple by pairing requests with static copies of them*. At certain hours of the day the server does slow down considerably, but pages are usually being served at the end (not perfect for the impatient). We have a new page for those who can and wish to support the site by donating. This site is run solely by volunteers.█
___ * Cache needs refreshing when a comment is left, but the requirement of registration to comment (which weeds out abusive/aggressive trolls) makes it a rarity.
In fact, many find that even when the vast majority of an organization’s IT infrastructure is made up of non-Microsoft based systems, Microsoft Windows systems make up the majority of maintenance resource expenditures, both for security management and more mundane system administration and troubleshooting. Thanks in part to the nature of Google’s business and the size and influence of the corporation, it is even likely to be well insulated against any need for compatibility with Microsoft-specific ways of doing things, both internally and externally.
Why aren’t people buying these things so easily anymore? I have the theory that, while the success of Windows was the ignorance of the user, Linux communities teach their users and this knowledge empowers people. After all, in the 21st Century, more computer users are awakening. Little by little, we are breaking this shell of fear and gullibility and we are beginning to see through the smoke generated to make us stumble. We read. We check. We double-check. We participate in forums and get informed.
Above all, beginner Linux users are abandoning herd mentality.
The machine is a middle to low end machine from a few years back (2001?): AMD Athlon XP 1800 (1.5gHz). 256 MB DDR266, 40 MB Hard Drive.
[...]
I installed a raft of games, vlc, xawtv, sound-juicer, childsplay, gcompris, ktouch and google-chrome as well as the default stuff for an XFCE4 desktop. A webcam from Logitech worked and I left a self-portrait on the desktop… I expect the owner will change that quickly.
HP announced a netbook for students that includes a metal-hinged case, carrying handle, and worldwide V.92 modem. Available in bulk orders only, the Mini 100e includes a 10.1-inch display, customizable case, network activity light, and a 1.66GHz Atom N455 processor with DDR3 RAM, the company says.
[...]
Customization also extends to the Mini 100e’s operating system: In addition to Windows 7 Starter Edition, the device will be offered with SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Windows XP Home Edition, HP says.
In openSUSE’s KDE team, we’ve recently planned the migration to Akonadi, the groupware caching solution that will be the base of upcoming KDE PIM versions, notably KDE’s address book, email client and calendar app.
With 57 percent (4,501) of the vote, the winner of the Linux.com T-Shirt Design Contest is “The People’s Product”, designed by Mr. Said Hassan who is a marketing consultant as SADAF Information Technology in Gaza in Palestine. “This design represents that the Linux system is the collective work of people and it was done so that others can enjoy a reliable, suitable operating system away from a monopoly. So, it’s like a celebration of our efforts: Linux is our product.”
The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this winning design are being produced now, and will be available for purchase at the Linux.com store soon-ish.
The performance of Btrfs has certainly improved a great deal since it was first introduced in the mainline kernel back with the Linux 2.6.29 release in early 2009. Today’s tests show that even with old hardware both when it comes to the processor and disk drive that even still Btrfs manages to perform well both with its default mount options and then again when taking advantage of the transparent compression support. Beyond the quantitative disk results, Btrfs also provides other advantages like with the system rollback support as being worked on in Fedora and solid state drive (SSD) optimizations. We are also exploring Btrfs in other ways at Phoronix to tie it into Phoromatic for some rather unique and interesting test capabilities.
It is good to see Canonical now pushing the Btrfs installation support into Ubuntu 10.10 after it has been available as an option in Fedora for more than a year now and is even the default file-system with MeeGo. For those interested in trying out this file-system, we certainly would recommend it and we look forward to its continued adoption.
It has been two years since the ATI Radeon HD 4800 (RV770) series launched so we have gone back since that monumental hardware launch and have re-tested each Catalyst driver release since then to see how the performance has changed for the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. The Catalyst driver has certainly matured over the course of two years in speeding up the OpenGL performance with this hardware along with bringing new features to their proprietary driver, but it is not exactly smooth sailing.
* Fixed a regression in 256.29 where Performance Level clock frequencies were reported incorrectly in nvidia-settings.
* Fixed a 3D Vision Stereo bug that caused the stereo glasses to not toggle when the flat panel was not running at its native mode timings.
* Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-settings to crash when rendering its thermal gauge widget if the range of valid values for the thermal sensor was empty.
The 256.35 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver
While there is the “Clover” branch of Mesa started by Zack Rusin for providing an OpenCL state tracker that can be used by Gallium3D hardware drivers, it hasn’t yet amounted to much. The OpenCL state tracker is not yet working, hasn’t been touched in months, and has yet to be integrated in the mainline Mesa code-base. However, as another GPGPU alternative, it looks like a CUDA back-end that’s specific to Intel’s open-source driver may end up being worked on.
Moodle is great for teachers in computer labs or for distant education. When done well, a course is much easier to manage than with paper-shuffling. Marks are automatically tabulated, for instance. Students can also get fast turn-around on assignments.
First, a bit of theory on why FOSS often creates better programs for artists. It is valuable for artists not only to use the programs but to also, with a little programming knowledge, be able to make the changes to the programs and at least actively help to guide the design. Often I tell people one of the reasons why people write Free Software is because the programmer wants to “scratch an itch,” to solve a problem that they have. Having a programmer who is also an artist means the artist can design into the program the features and patterns of operation that is best for what they are doing.
In addition to offloading video decoding duties onto compatible GPUs, the new version of VLC promises better audio support and faster performance. Thanks to extensive optimization and rewriting, VideoLAN claims HD video decoding can be done up to 40% faster (presumably without the assistance of dedicated decode hardware).
Among some of the new features introduced by the VLC 1.1.0 player we can mention:
· GPU decoding using VAAPI for H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1;
· DSP decoding using OpenMax IL;
· Improved seeking for High-Definition (HD) MKV files;
· Support for Blu-Ray PGS subtitles;
· Support for HD-DVB subtitles;
· Support for VP8, MPEG-4 lossless and Indeo5 video codecs;
· Encoding and decoding of the WebM format;
· Support for Atrac1, FLAC 6.1/7.1, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, MPRG-4 ALS audio codecs;
· DVD-Audio files support;
· Optimized for SSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon;
· Improved streaming performance;
· New x11, xv and glx modules;
· ADPCM support for FLV files;
· and many more!
Overall, I am impressed with Album Shaper. Its simply interface and uncluttered approach to menus gives the impression that it is a beginners-only app, but Album Shaper has a lot to offer shutter pros as well.
It’s been a while since the last release. Quite a few bug-fixes have piled up in the stable branch, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series.
CrossOver for FreeBSD is a commercial variant of Wine released by CodeWeavers with (currently) limited support for many of today’s most popular office application and games. CrossOver Office and Games for FreeBSD is tested for performance and stability with many of todays most popular games such as Guild Wars,
SkypeKit is described as “a collection of software and APIs that allows Internet-connected devices or applications to offer Skype voice and video calls. SkypeKit is designed to work with a wide variety of chip sets, operating systems, and audio/video devices.” SkypeKit is much more in-depth than the previous Skype API that was exposed to third-parties.
The Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) was a leading 16-bit video game console system. The console was developed by Sega Corporation in 1988. Sega was unable to obtain trademark rights in North America, and it was released in that market under the name of Sega Genesis.
After this morning’s article about Linux Game Publishing, it appeared on SlashDot, and Linux Game Publishing broke their months of silence. Below is the message, presumably by Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP.
Is grateful to Slashdot for finally noticing that LGP exists, after militantly ignoring any game release we have made for the last 5 years, as soon as reports of our death come through, we get a front page story. Slashdot – Your support of Linux is inspirational. For others who wonder, we are very much alive. We have had a couple of staffing issues on the admin side of things, which explains most of our silence, but work is progressing on more than one unannounced title. We will offer further updates as and when there is news to update you with.
We can also determine an upper bound based on client downloads. Here we see that 21% of all our customers have at least clicked on the Linux download link.
For now, the Pearson site continues to be dark, but there are reports that the group has managed to deliver KDE 3.5.11 for Ubuntu. The main Trinity development site is live and on Launchpad, Canonical’s, the company behind Ubuntu, Web-based collaborative software development Website.
Others, though, are driving the bus of KDE and have chosen to “improve” the desktop. Others, who feel as I do are trying to preserve the look and feel of the 3.5 version. Whether the group doing the work can sustain an independent branch of KDE is a question. KDE is large and complex and the libraries it depends upon changed, causing some of the development of the 4 branch.
A lightweight Linux distribution often seems to require making sacrifices — using a UI which many users would find unfamiliar and using software which is heavily cut down in functionality.
WattOS is a really interesting lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as of WattOS R2). As the name might suggest, it is also focused on low power usage and is said to work well with older and less powerful hardware.
[...]
If you are looking for a lightweight Linux, WattOS is most definitely worth a look.
The numbers we did get to see weren’t too shabby, either. Revenue increased by 20% year over year to $209 million, and a whopping $179 million of that business came from subscription fees. And like I said, Red Hat has a lot of guaranteed business in its internal books that won’t show up anywhere in the income statement until those customers start paying their subscription bills.
Why does RedHat still provide tools for GNU/Linux on the desktop in individual installations or huge roll-outs? Their customers demand it. If RedHat did not provide the service, then someone else would and might siphon off the lucrative server/services/training business… Ah! There’s the thing. GNU/Linux on the desktop is not a huge money maker for them but it does work for the customer and RedHat gets money for consultation/setup.
In this morning’s Red Hat Summit sessions, Jean Staten Healy and Bob Sutor of IBM presented on the solutions that communities around the world are implementing using Linux as a catalyst for a smarter planet.
The IT industry exists to solve problems. And you can solve them at a micro level, or you can look problems that are so huge, they affect countries, or the entire world. The range is huge, and complexity varies tremendously. Smarter Planet is about a macro approach. It’s meant for those really significant problems and to answer how IT can help solve those problems.
I like the way Ubuntu One will sync up databases. This is a great feature for developers, and I hope more will take advantage of it. Apart from that one feature though Dropbox is the better product. It is easy to install and use, pricing is better, it works across operating systems, and is something you could recommend to your technically challenged friends.
Well, the main reason is because trying out different Linux distributions is so much fun, isn’t it? There was nothing really wrong with Fedora, in fact it did a lot of things right, but I wanted to configure my file server with a lightweight environment and then leave it alone. I’ve spent too much time on that thing already.
Firstly, I replaced Ubuntu with Arch and LXDE, to see if I could get it working with anything else than Ubuntu. I’ve installed Arch probably 50 times before, but this time I couldn’t get the keyboard layout right in X. Hal should take care of that, and yet it didn’t. Also, the screen resolution was way off, and I couldn’t get the nouveau drivers configured, while the chipset was too old for the regular nvidia driver. Exit Arch.
[...]
As always, installing and using Ubuntu is a very agreeable experience. As with Fedora, all hardware worked out of the box, and installing extra codecs and suchlike was a bit easier. It doesn’t look as sleek as Fedora, but it doesn’t look bad either. A bit heavy for a theme called “Light”, but otherwise okay. I do think the focus on looks is a good thing, and I must admit that picture of a PC that runs Ubuntu looks very good.
Developer Glenn “TheeMahn” Cady created the antecedent to Ultimate Edition in 2006, a version of Ubuntu with a Christmas theme that he called Ubuntu Christmas Edition. Its successor, Ubuntu Ultimate, drew an e-mail from Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu, asking Cady not to use the Ubuntu name or logo because of trademark issues, so he changed the name to Ultimate Edition. Over time the distribution has grown in scope and power. While it caters to new users, it also bundles powerful tools for programming, as well as software called Ultamatix that allows users to easily install additional software and games.
Here’s the problem I have with this electrophoretic technology: it’s only black and white. While that doesn’t matter with novels, having color sure does make a difference for many technical books. As my friend Carla Schroder, writer and editor of Linux Planet, put it, “Books in color is where it’s at, especially technical and how-to books. Why would I want to put my Audacity [an excellent, open-source audio editor] book on the Kindle, for one example, when being able to show blue waveforms and green level meters and red clipping bars adds tons of useful information.”
Perhaps that is the future of Linux on the desktop – at least, Linux on the relatively small desktop. Like Android, it’s not the sort of Linux experience that we are used to, though MeeGo is far closer to “traditional” Linux than Android is. But perhaps it’s an experience that will bring in a new set of users; once they get used to this environment, the full Linux experience will be there for them to discover. That should be a good thing.
One of the primary differences between the ARM version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the version built for x86 processors is that Ubuntu 10.7′s program launcher doesn’t require 3D hardware drivers since the whole thing is designed with 2D graphics. I have to say, the UI looks awfully snappy on the demo unit.
The Midgard Project has released the first maintenance release of Midgard2 10.05.1 “Ratatoskr” LTS. Ratatoskr LTS is a Long Term Support version of Midgard2 Content Repository.
I can’t name one major Open-Source-not-Free-Software activist that offers up any real criticism to the Free Software messaging coming out of the FSF. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist – I have covered in this blog a few lawyer and professor types that laid out very intelligent and considered issues on the GPL and Free Software in general, but they are so few and far between.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of criticism against Free Software basically starts with “Freetard” and ends with “Communist/Socialist/Zealot”. Usually there are a lot of lies and distortions in the middle – I wonder what motivates someone to take a position they are not able to rationally defend, one which they must resort to (and repeat) logical fallacies of all flavors?
Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’. So OK, ‘steal’ is an emotive word, which we probably don’t want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be ‘derivative’ – and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here’s my point: I don’t mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don’t make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have – some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I’m an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.
OdfKit is a project that reuses WebKit technology in a toolkit for working with ODF office documents. KO GmbH is sponsored by NLnet to work on OdfKit for three months. This week, Chani, who is on her way to Akademy, is working with me on OdfKit and since she’s here an entire week, we’re calling it OdfKit Hack Week.
The Mimosa Dancing Girls strip joint on the edge of New Orleans was probably not what BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg had in mind when he promised last week that the company would look after the “small people” affected by the Gulf oil spill. But then every day seems to be full of unpleasant surprises for BP.
BP has been accused by a senior US politician of lying to Congress to reduce its liabilities, after an internal company document showed that the oil giant’s own worst-case assessment of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was 20 times its public estimate.
An oil worker who survived the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion has claimed that the oil rig’s safety equipment was leaking several weeks before it exploded, triggering the huge spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Plans to overturn the 25-year old global ban on commercial whaling in return for reducing the numbers of whales killed each year were in confusion today with governments and groups divided.
Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when FDR’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. And here in Germany a few scholars see parallels to the policies of Heinrich Brüning, the chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose devotion to financial orthodoxy ended up sealing the doom of the Weimar Republic.
One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.
The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.
Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards offer the opportunity for readers to vote for their Linux and Open Source favorites. We compiled nominations and came up with the following list. If your favorite is not listed in any category, we encourage you to write in your vote (it’s also okay to skip voting in categories not applicable to you).
As Steven Vaughan-Nichols notes, Hewlett-Packard, the number one PC seller on the planet is trending toward becoming a significant Linux distributor. In acquiring Palm, HP also acquires the Linux-based WebOS, and if HP is smart, it will pursue a very open strategy with WebOS, possibly on mobile phones, and possible on iPad-like tablet devices. HP also has acquired rights to Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace, a lean Linux distro that provides instant-on capabilities.
It is unfortunate that HP doesn’t offer Gnu/Linux on these machines. The way HP offers ‘options’ to choose the desired processors and other hardware, it would be a fair business practice to offer choice of operating system as well for those enterprise customers who want to run their own OS but don’t want to pay Microsoft tax.
Minitube is just one example but I could name hundreds off the top of my head. I love these little projects and while most of the attention is on the grown up side of Linux and open source software, I have a special fondness for those projects that are a little less ‘mature’. I love what companies like Canonical have done to polish their Ubuntu Linux distributions into an operating system worthy of powering the computers that make business tick. In fact, I love the fact Ubuntu is a respected and grown up product. We’ve made it. This is the big time.
Skip Guenter is a Director for The HeliOS Project so one would expect him to put in a little extra effort but Skip passed “a little extra” sometime in early May. Skip worked dozens of his own hours to get equipment running, computers operational and things organized for the technical side of the room. I also want to thank Ron West for his dedication to what we do and the sweat equity he put into Linux Against Poverty. What many people did not see was the pre-activities prior to LAP.
It would appear that Linus Torvalds has resolved to apply a strict policy of accepting only bug fix changes to the kernel after the merge window has closed. Torvalds has also stuck his oar into the debate over the Android suspend block API and made the situation even more complicated.
For years, major changes for each new Linux kernel version have been merged into the main development tree during the merge window, which usually lasts about two weeks and concludes with the release of the first pre-release version of the next kernel (2.6.x-rc1). Thereafter, changes are theoretically restricted to patches which fix existing bugs without giving rise to new ones. In practice, RC2 and RC3 have included the odd major change and some clean up work, such as resolving compiler warnings, has found its way in at an even later stage.
There are many examples of file systems that use FUSE. Sometimes FUSE is used for prototyping or testing file systems or it is used as the file system itself. It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of them or even a good chunk of them, but some that you might recognize (or might not) include:
* SSHFS This is a file system client that can mount and interact with directories and files on a remote system using sftp. Very handy file system for mounting remote file systems.
* GmailFS This FUSE based file system was written to use Google’s email storage as a file system. Originally it used the gmail web interface but this kept changing. The previous link takes you to a new version of GmailFS that uses IMAP to use the gmail email space as a file system. One of the interesting aspects of this file system is that it’s written in Python.
* EncFS This FUSE based file system provides an encrypted file system for Linux. For a discussion about encrypted file systems and Linux please read this.
The second X.Org Server 1.9 release candidate was released earlier today after the first RC making it out just last week, but already the third release candidate is available to interested parties.
Xnoise is basically an music player but it can also play videos too and unlike other Linux music players, it uses a tracklist centric design:
The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed (right side of window). This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not.
VLC 1.1.0 Final is released, this release comes with a lot of improvements, it is faster than the previous version, has Better streaming capabilities, better audio experience, improved web plugins and comes with support for WebM decoding and encoding.
There are a few reasons why I use Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu on my systems. That being said one of the reasons I do not list for using Mint over Ubuntu is their “Software Manager”. The software manager in Mint 8 was flat out sad compared to the Ubuntu Software Center that Ubuntu 9.10 included. Now even though the software manager in Mint 9 has many improvements, it still has issues, and I don’t think it is quiet on-par with the updated Software Center Ubuntu 10.04 includes.
I’m so far out of the loop these days that I didn’t even realize E3 was this past week until after the initial conferences, but out of the annual conference comes this new footage from G4 of long-time Linux pal id Software’s latest title, Rage.
There’s not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..
My hands tremble as I write this and my mind is left weakened by the things I have witnessed. The contents of this message might be too terrible and unspeakable to believe, but I assure you that it is all very real. For the sake of us all, I urge you, dear Reader, to keep an open mind, and very seriously consider the matters which I am about to disclose.
On Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn’t need multiple layers of security software.
One of the mini distribution based on Unity Linux, it a great choice for old machines cause it does not take a big amount of RAM and CPU usage, using OpenBox 3.4.11 lightweight window manager, simple LXPanel, and many installed application will mention it later on the review.
Never thought I would be writing this, but I am actually considering moving my Linux boxes (based mainly in OpenSuSE and Fedoras) to Mandriva! During my hey days we always considered Mandrake (it’s name then) something of a play distribution or a distribution for Linux beginners and should not be used for ‘serious’ work.
Fast forward about 10 years, after a name change I don’t know why suddenly I felt an urge to pick up the latest version of Mandriva 2010 to give it the proverbial spin. After playing around with the bought version of Mandriva (yes I actually bought a copy!). I really started liking it. Let me just list down a few of the reasons why.
The Linux company, which is based in France and Brazil, had been operating in recent months under the threat of potential bankruptcy, as its finances were reportedly precarious.
According to the French press Laprévote rallied investors “to return the group to balance and find a good business model.” He said that the community does not need to be concerned about the outfit’s future any longer.
Laprévote took the CEO job in April. In May a posting in one of the Mandriva forums revealed major cash flow problems and the existence of plans to perhaps sell or merge the company.
One of the possible buyers named was Lightapp, but that deal apparently fell through, and then Linagora was rumoured to be in talks with Mandriva.
Design team has kicked off concepts for Laughling release theme quoted: Something that can illustrate the emergence concept, like multiple objects combined to create a new one (more complex).
When I find an outstanding distro, such as Fedora, I prefer to buy the media from an on-line vendor as a way of showing my support. Most of the time the money goes directly to the vendor, however, I happened upon the Sponsored Media Program today and found a vendor who participates in this program.
The Fedora 13 Xfce spin has more applications than the LXDE spin. So far the machine crashed on the screensaver (in Xfce, not in LXDE, and the same thing has been happening with Ubuntu Lucid if I don’t choose blanking the screen instead of a random screensaver).
Currently I prefer to use Ubuntu, after I felt the ability to provide Ubuntu Graphical on my laptop, especially Ubuntu 10.04. There are a few that made me feel at home using and choosing Ubuntu Linux operating system, which are as follows:
1. No Virus – because Linux does not recognize the files of his Win32 executables, so the possibility of taxable virus is 0%, it is also felt by fellow users of the Linux operating system in general.
2. Open Source – Linux distributions are open source and the source code can be edited and modified according to our needs. We can learn how to work the Ubuntu (Linux) Operating System
Colin Watson (Ubuntu Development Manager) just announced on the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list that you can now perform installations with a BTRFS root filesystem using the latest Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat daily ISO. Note: I’ve downloaded the latest ISO and I do not see an option to format a partition as BTRFS when choosing to specify partitions manuallt so probably this will be available starting tomorrow’s daily ISO.
Wind River has rev’d its GUI development suite for embedded devices, adding support for OpenGL 3D graphics. Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite 5.8 also broadens its embedded target operating system support from Linux and VxWorks to Windows CE and Windows XP, and adds support for more hardware platforms, including the Intel Atom, says the company.
Android cofounder and Google vice president Andy Rubin just announced at the Droid X event that 160,000 Android devices are being sold per day. That’s up sharply from last month when Google announced that 100,000 Android devices were being activated each day.
The Linux Foundation today announced the addition of new sessions and keynotes for LinuxCon 2010. The announcement finalizes the list of speakers and professional session planned for the conference, which will take place in Boston August 10-12.
Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.
Results from our beta testing show Firefox 3.6.4 will significantly reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games. When a plugin crashes or freezes while using Firefox, users can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simply refreshing the page.
An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google’s Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster. In an entry on his personal blog that was reposted to Mozilla’s uber-blog, Planet Mozilla, John Wayne Hill, an Indiana University masters student interning this summer at the open source company, spelled out changes that would give users the feeling that Firefox starts quicker.
Back in March 2010, Marten Mickos, best known as the man who built MySQL into an estimated $100 million enterprise, made headlines when he stepped in at Eucalyptus in the role of CEO. But even before that, a partnership with Canonical to provide the platform at the heart of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud beginning with 2009’s Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 garnered Eucalyptus a lot of notice.
The term “open core” essentially means that the heart of a software project is built on, and remains, open source but added features may not be (particularly a commercial version intended for enterprise use).VC-funded software startups love this model.
This proprietary to open source to public domain source code release Standard will bring to an end the present conflict between proprietary and open code development models. Some companies and individuals will choose to develop their software as open source, to take advantage of the extra and free resources that the open source developing model provides, while others will prefer to develop it as proprietary code, to gain a competitive advantage once it is release. One way or another, within a set number of years the code will become public domain, free for all to use, share and modify.
The idea behind this project is to test the architecture of a heavy duty web server.
Although it’s a really nice and graphically appealing PHP website, the major interest is to test hardware and resource usage / op.sys. (ubuntu server 10.04) and basic server modules.
One interesting explanation offered when I asked on Twitter came from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul – himself a key Free software developer as author of the great micro-blogging client Gwibber.
He suggests the situation is precipitated by the influx of new technology strategies such as Software as a Service, mobile, tablet, virtualisation and web services. Since the applicability of software freedom philosophies to these technologies is often unclear, there’s no positive rallying-point for activists and the only remaining alternative is to demonise anyone engaging with them. That happens even if the engagement is aimed at subverting or liberating them.
The articulation of software freedom arose before today’s massively-connected society, and today requires thinking and experimentation to make it fit the new reality – hence my work at OSI.
But also the FSF already had positive campaigns. Here some recent examples from the FSFs:
* Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day is a day for Document Freedom and for Open Standards. FSFE did most of the work for the central organisation of the DFD in the past years to promote Open Standards. The FSF also has a campaign page for Open Standards.
* rOgg On: For this years DFD FSFE promoted Ogg Vorbis. The German and the Austrian team encouraged two radio stations which already use Ogg vorbis, by giving them a prize and a tart with the “rOgg On” slogon. Deutschlandradio stated that they Feel more honoured than for the Grimme Prize”. The picutres clearly show how positive that campaign was. During that campaign we translated FSF’s PlayOgg website into German, which also is a positive campaign.
* I love Free Software For this years Valentine’s Day we started the “I love Free Software” campaign. People can show their love to Free Software.
* PDFreaders.org FSFE’s Fellows started a campaign for Free Software PDFreaders and also explaining Open Standards in this context.
According to Rob Pegoraro at the Faster Forward blog, the District “will let overseas voters cast ballots online using open-source, standards-based software, not the closed, proprietary mechanisms that have dominated electronic voting throughout its troubled history in the United States.”
A Palo Alto, Calif., developer of election software, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, will provide the new system. According to company representatives, starting with September’s primary election, D.C. residents serving overseas and others far out of town won’t have to choose between voting by mailed-in paper ballot or a faxed or e-mailed ballot.
The “Free Culture” Movement, instantiated in a 2004 publication by Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig, is a reaction to content ownership in a digital age. Because The Open Clip Art Library is, at it’s core, a platform to freely share and collaborate created content, it will be forever intertwined with the Movement.
Science is based on building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open.
That’s the belief of four leaders who have put forth a groundbreaking set of recommendations for scientists to more easily share their data – The Panton Principles – and who have been named the latest SPARC Innovators for their work.
We’re proud to announce the release of the Portability Policy, the latest creation from the DataPortability Project. We believe that this will help further the vision of digital freedom that was the founding ideal of our group two years ago.
The software industry is still figuring out the right balance between open and closed, but we believe that communication is the first step. The DataPortability Project encourages standard, plain language policies describing how data and digital “stuff” can be moved from one product to another.
The Internet has recently made possible the free global availability of scientific journal articles. Open Access (OA) can occur either via OA scientific journals, or via authors posting manuscripts of articles published in subscription journals in open web repositories. So far there have been few systematic studies showing how big the extent of OA is, in particular studies covering all fields of science.
Sometimes even noise can produce a gold mine of information. Back in 1964, scientists at Bell Laboratories, listening for faint radio signals they had bounced off of an early communications satellite, detected static that seemed to be emanating in space from all directions. That static turned out to be cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. In the decades since, studies of that radiation have underpinned much of what we know about the universe.
The judge who overturned deepwater drilling bans allowing BP to resume oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, had shares in Transocean and other firms in the industry, it was revealed today.
Yesterday, a Louisiana-based judge Martin Feldman ruled that Barack Obama’s six-month drilling moratorium in the Gulf was unjustified because it assumed that all deepwater drilling was as dangerous as BP’s.
Europe will import its first solar-generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said in an interview on Sunday.
BP is the top dog, arrogating to itself the lion’s share of the wealth from the deepwater oil reserves and displacing the risks onto the rest of us. The oil industry took pains to secure a statutory limit on its liability from offshore oil spills to a paltry $75 million, after which we taxpayers pick up the tab. Efforts to raise that liability cap to $10 billion or eliminate it altogether are in the works, but there is sure to be fierce opposition, and not just from Republicans.
Knock a glass of water over a page. The fibers will soften, the ink will run, the corners will curl. Wet paper is no good to anyone, but few people realize just how much water goes into producing the dry, white page.
“You need water to grow the trees, clean the wood, separate out the cellulose from the lignin, turn the pulp into paper, and then steam dry it,” says Gilles L’Hermitte, Sustainability Development Manager at paper manufacturers Arjowiggins Graphic. Which all adds to the argument for recycled paper. “If you start with an ‘urban forest’,” as L’Hermitte calls it, “you’ll need much less water to turn old pulp into new paper than if you start with a tree.” Arjowiggins Graphic estimates that their mills use up to 47% less water for paper from de-inked pulp than from virgin sources. And, they claim, because the recycled pulp has to be cleaned so many times to rid it of all the ink, it comes out even whiter than the virgin page.
New measures of national income. GDP is outdated; inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable. Better measures of national income that count real costs (like pollution) and benefits (like health) are what will shape better behavior from organizations and markets.
Measures of well-being. GDP is a measure of income. What’s missing from that picture? Well-being, of course. More income doesn’t automatically make everyone better off all the time, in the same ways. Without measures of well being to live up to, no better behavior is likely to ever flow from organizations and markets.
New currencies. A currency is an especially cruel a form of collective punishment, an implicit tax. In the aftermath of inevitable, regular-as-clockwork financial crisis, everyone holding a currency suffers, whether or not they had anything to do with said crisis. When currencies are created that are independent of countries and regions, people will the choice to escape the bone-headed organizations and markets within them. That, in turn, will set incentives for better behavior. Creating “product”? Stop. Create a currency instead.
New measures of returns. What counts as a “return,” anyways? Increasingly, as we’ve recently discussed, bleeding edge investors are beginning to develop measures of returns to people, communities, and society. They provide a more nuanced, sophisticated picture of the value a firm has actually created — or a market allocated — than mere financial returns (“profit”). Better behavior from organizations and markets is ineluctably tied to better measurements of what is returned from them.
Leaders target funding for unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid — but neither party has suggested trimming more than 60 tax breaks worth $32 billion to special interests.
Americans aren’t convinced new Wall Street rules will prevent a future financial crisis.
An Associated Press-GfK Poll finds that 64 percent of those surveyed aren’t confident that a financial regulation overhaul before Congress will avert another meltdown.
In the end, the political clout of 18,000 auto dealers scattered nationwide was too much even for President Barack Obama.
House and Senate negotiators putting final shape to a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations all but agreed Tuesday to exclude auto dealers from the oversight of a consumer financial protection bureau.
“The political reality is that those of us who have fought against an auto dealer carve-out can’t prevail,” Representative Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.
State Street isn’t one of the iconic firms of Wall Street. It doesn’t even make the top 10 largest bank holding companies in the country. But on Capitol Hill this week, as lawmakers finalize new rules regulating Wall Street, Boston-based State Street wields enormous influence.
President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers are urging America’s major economic allies not to sacrifice economic growth to efforts to trim budget deficits.
Stocks fluctuated Wednesday after the Federal Reserve indicated that problems in Europe pose a threat to the economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose about 4 points in late afternoon trading while broader indexes fell. Treasury prices rose, pushing down interest rates. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to its lowest level in more than a year.
House negotiators on legislation providing an overhaul of the financial system have agreed to drop their demand for a $150 billion fund to cover costs of liquidating large, failing institutions.
The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, said on Tuesday that taxpayers were recovering their investment from the financial bailouts as the program was wound down. But he acknowledged there would probably be a loss from the rescue of the insurer American International Group.
The lead Senate Wall Street reform negotiator acknowledged Tuesday that Democrats are facing a nail-biting vote in the Senate, forcing congressional leaders to lean on Republicans to pass a bill unlikely to gain the support of two Democrats who have been holdouts for weeks.
The Consumer Federation of America is throwing its 40th annual awards dinner tonight honoring Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) for their public service. And the consumer advocacy group received interest in the dinner from an unlikely quarter: the financial services industry.
One of the fiercest debates during the Wall Street Reform conference negotiations has been over Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)’s amendment to improve the quality of capital used by America’s banks. The amendment would accomplish this by eliminating the designation of “trust-preferred securities” as Tier 1 capital.
James Madison (drafter of the US first amendment) once wrote that “government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both”.
This is certainly true of Afghanistan, where the US-led coalition has been able to avoid a true audit of the impact of its presence via tight control of the media combined with manipulated patriotism.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is at the centre of a US security scare, has emerged from hiding to say that he is not afraid of the Pentagon but that he has been advised by his lawyers to avoid travelling to the United States.
China’s online games companies must take steps to protect children from unwholesome and corrupting content, according to new regulations issued Tuesday by the Ministry of Culture.
Anger and confusion remains high over these private “back door” meetings that the Federal Communications Commission has been holding with various “stakeholders” regarding its proposed open Internet rules. Reform groups are still up in arms over the Tuesday gatherings, which appear to have focused on a legislative solution to the problem. Congress, it should be noted, is exploring rewriting the Communications Act in response to the current FCC logjam on the issue.
THE US International Trade Commission (ITC) is investigating a complaint from the maker of very expensive printer ink, HP, that some of its rivals are making the stuff a lot cheaper.
US Copyright Group, which is really DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, has made a lot of news recently for unleashing thousands of lawsuits on people it accuses of infringing on copyrights, in an effort not to stop infringement, but to send out “pre-settlement letters” to get people to pay up to avoid the lawsuits. Dunlap keeps insisting, despite similar efforts accusing perfectly innocent people of infringement and demanding payment, that its technology is reliable and credible. CCS Labs, a company that does work in the computer crime field, was curious about this and asked US Copyright Group for the right to review its methodology and technology.
Michael Geist sez, “There was considerable attention yesterday on a media report stating that Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore warned against ‘radical extremists’ opposing C-32. A video of part of his remarks has now been posted online. The comments, which come after the prepared speech, feature a no-holds-barred attack against those arguing for fair copyright. According to Moore, some proposed amendments to C-32 are not genuine but rather part of an attempt to oppose copyright and copyright reform, to drum up fear, and to mislead. Moore encourages confrontation, urging the audience to confront on Facebook, Twitter, talk shows and in the media until ‘they are defeated.’”
As the Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has declared war on copyright reformers who object to his plan to bring US-style “digital locks” rules to Canada, I think it’s worth spelling out what my objections, as a Canadian author, are to his plan (my books are distributed across Canada by the excellent HB Fenn; last year I won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book; as I write this, my novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists).
[...]
Get that? People who create stuff should have the right to let their audiences move copyrighted works to other platforms.
I challenge Minister Moore to climb down from his nasty smears about copyright reformers and address this and other legitimate concerns over digital locks rules. Thousands and thousands of Canadians spoke out against this kind of rule in the Canadian copyright proceedings. James Moore has tabled a bill that ignores the results of his own consultation, and then had the bad grace to smear the creators and audiences who, in good faith, came forward to participate in the debate over the future of Canadian copyright.
“We have identified the following links that are available via Google’s search engine, and request the following links be removed as soon as possible as they directly link to sound recordings owned by our members”, p2pnet had the BPI saying, quoting Chilling Effects.
Movie fans downloading free pirated films are no longer Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but that’s only because of a newer menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services.
Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore’s “radical extremists” comment yesterday generated considerable attention, though he privately denied saying it in some correspondence (one DM: “Not what I said. Not even close”). New video has now been posted that confirms the comment and further attacks on those supporting fair copyright. The latest comments:
With regard to the legislation, we really did try to strike a balance with this legislation. You’ll notice, I think, we’re now three weeks into the public consideration of the legislation that we tabled. There is a lot of commentary out there on this online and I think the response that we’re getting is that that generally is the case. The only people who are opposed to this legislation are really two groups of radical extremists. In the continuum of political ideaology, if you go really extreme to the right or really extreme to the left it actually swings back around. That is sort of where we are.
Well this is a pleasant surprise. Like many others, I had assumed that the court reviewing the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit would not accept either side’s position for summary judgment and the case would go to a full trial. However, as Eric Goldman alerts us, the court has quickly ruled in favor of Google/YouTube, saying that it is, in fact, protected by the DMCA’s safe harbors.
Apple Inc. is now collecting the “precise,” “real-time geographic location” of its users’ iPhones, iPads and computers.
In an updated version of its privacy policy, the company added a paragraph noting that once users agree, Apple and unspecified “partners and licensees” may collect and store user location data.
Summary: OpenSUSE does the right thing by actively distancing itself from Novell (and thus from Microsoft’s patent deal too)
