Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar has written in to report that he and his team at the Interactive Computing Lab in ENAC, Toulouse have been successful in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainlinue X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7), there is now multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions.
During CompuTex I found a possible answer to this at the side of my own netbook, where I hung a 32 GByte Corsair Flash to make up for the fact that my HP Mini came with just 2 Gbytes of main storage. (Shown is the 64 GByte version.)
Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, whom I met for the first time at the show, did not need a Corsair on his HP Mini, and noted it came with Ubuntu installed, from the HP online store.
SkyOS -- a desktop OS platform, albeit a closed-source one -- had been under development for a while now. It looked quite nice, although it was only available to a limited selection of alpha-testers. Then as of January, things ground to a halt. "The speed at which new hardware and technology gets developed has increased dramatically in the last few years," wrote SkyOS's main developer, Robert Szeleney. "Trying to catch up with development of frameworks, drivers, applications, test, etc. got way more complicated than years ago."
Reader Mark Scott submitted this interesting variation on Linux OEM netbooks: this one is bundled with Symantec's Norton 360.
Symantec's Norton 360 is an all-in-one anti-virus anti-phishing anti-spyware anti-botnet pro-firewall, backup and restore, the kitchen sink, and much more. Annual subscriptions cost $79.99.
Comet sells a nice-looking Toshiba NB100-11R netbook that comes with "Linux". It does not say which Linux, but the customer reviews reveal that it is Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
In an attempt to reach technological independence Cuba has placed its bets on open-source software, a fact evidenced at the presentation of the Nova Operating System 2.0 during the 2009 International Convention of Informatics.
This application, based on the GNU/Linux open-source software, allows users to do their office work, play music and video files as well as web browsing among other features, and will be improved before its release.
Do you have an old Mac G3 or G4 lying around doing nothing? Did you know that old dinosaur could make a great server or desktop with the help of everyone’s favorite open source operating system Linux? Most people don’t realize there are Linux ports for PPC. There are, and they will make that old machine seem like it’s younger and snappier than it ever did.
In this episode: Unix is 40 years old, Google releases an alpha Linux version of its Chrome browser and ARM-powered laptops are spotted at Computex. Is Linux a difficult development platform and should we thin the licensing herd?
This week Dan and Fab interview Stuart “Aq” Langridge of Canonical and formerly LugRadio about Ubuntu One, talk about the Pirate Party boarding the EU, Snowy, Bing and all the Linux news from Computex.
The “I upgraded to the latest version and now sound doesn't work” type of regression.
With Linux now settled in a nice and predictable 2.6.x series the future looks promising.
Let's hope the distributors learn from past mistakes and put reliability and usability above the urge to rush new – and often quite high end – features to their consumers.
Mick Scully, Cisco Vice President at the Access Routing Technology group put out a VoD announcing the finalists.
In a space where custom-built Linux or Unix syslog servers still reign supreme, and the acquisition of new equipment is on hold for many organizations, these minimum requirements might scare off some potential users.
"With server budgets flat or declining for 2009, there seems to be little good news or growth areas to highlight in this latest study," said Bob Gill, TheInfoPro's Managing Director of Server Research. "One exception, though, can be seen in the deployment of Linux-based servers, which, while not dominant from the perspective of total OSs installed, continues to maintain growth year over year. With Linux every bit as robust as Unix in interviewees' minds, the growing ISV base and the inescapable economics of advancing x86 technology paint a rosy picture for Linux in the coming years. There seems to be little conflict between Linux and Windows Server in most enterprises because the OSs are serving different application bases."
For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. Not only has the construction of supercomputers helped push the envolope of what is possible within the computing field, but the calculations supercomputers have performed for us have helped further both science and technology, and ultimately our lives.
The new NILFS2 treats the whole disk as a consecutive list of blocks (or "log"), and never rewrites blocks. As a result, all modifications and creations are converted into sequential operations, which are said to be faster. Other NILFS2 improvements are said to include the ability to offer a more coherent historical view of operations, called "continuus snapshotting," enabling users to restore files that have been mistakenly destroyed only a few seconds previously.
Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released with hundreds of changes from the previous version, including a new architecture for suspend and resume which Linus Torvalds says switches the kernel to a "new world order".
As an IT Professional, electronics consumer, and GNU/Linux user, I am continuously looking for Peripherals providers that support the "Universal Operating System" (GNU/Linux).
I'm the guy that you'll find in the nearby BestBuy store, or Walmart, or even Office Depot, hunkered down in the electronics aisle, flipping over boxes looking at "System Requirements" to see if there's any indication of vendors doing the right thing and printing "Works with GNU/Linux"(or perhaps even affixing the Tux Penguin emblem) on their packaging. And although a great number of peripherals and hardware work with GNU/Linux, sometimes it's still a bit difficult to be absolutely positive. With your help, I aim to change that.
On June 12, Foster Findlay Associates (ffA) plans to release SEA 3D Pro 2009.1, the latest version of its desktop 3D seismic analysis and volume interpretation software, on the Linux platform.
It was just one week ago that there was an update released to the DisplayLink X.Org driver and its kernel frame-buffer module, but there is now yet another update available. This time around the xf86-video-displaylink driver is at version 0.3 and it adds preliminary support for RandR and eliminates its ShadowFB support.
Sidux Linux, based on Debian Sid (the 'unstable' branch) and touted as being 'Debian Hot & Spicy!', has released their 2.6.30 kernel with a huge surprise.
If you read around the web about the release of this new kernel, nearly every article discusses increased performance and a large number of new drivers for the 2.6.30 kernel release. But within Sidux, the kernel developer slh has decided to remove all non-Free (Libre) firmware from the Sidux kernels. The result is poor hardware performance within Sidux 2.6.30 kernels, at least thus far according to rants on the OFTC irc network on the #sidux and #smxi channels.
The second Linux kernel of 2009 is now out, sporting a long list of improvements -- and at least one regression.
New filesystem support, security and driver improvements are all part of the new Linux 2.6.30 kernel release, although one of the most noticeable elements in the new release is the kernel inclusion of fastboot, an enhancement designed to speed startup for Linux-based systems.
There is hope for Ubuntu users with Intel graphics. As it appears, the current 2D drivers solve most of the recent graphics problems with Intel chips, according to Ubuntu developer Bryce Harrington in a developer mailing list. Jaunty users should profit it from them as well.
We all need a break from our daily routine, and many PC users like that break to be in the form of a game. This is where most people say Linux doesn’t have any games. Au contraire mon ami. Linux does have games. Not your modern full-on 3D games that require more computing power than your average Beowulf cluster, but it does have a large amount of solid games that can serve to get your game-break on.
The release of Fedora 11 promises numerous new improvements. One such improvement is an updated and more efficient package manager. How does it compare to the previous release, version 10?
A small but intense code sprint took place in Oslo last weekend. Peder Osevoll Midthjell, Sveinung Dalatun and Anders Sandven, who work on mobile broadband connections for Linux as their thesis project, met with Darío Freddi, Will Stephenson and Frederik Gladhorn of KDE. Knut Yrvin spent his weekend with us to make us feel comfortable at Qt Software.
The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects. Current confirmed keynotes are:
* Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation * Walter Bender, Executive Director, Sugar Labs * Robert Lefkowitz, Distinguished Engineer of the ACM * Jakub Pavelek, Nokia
Puppy is more than just a distro. It's a whole family of colorful editions, each catering its own special, unique motto. If the official release cannot satisfy your needs, one of the Puplets surely will. The possibilities are endless, limited only by your time and bandwidth.
Exploring the world of Linux live CD experience has never been more fun. Download your favorite Puppy and start playing. Macpup is definitely one of the finer breeds out there, but who knows what you might find?
Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.
New Blue Caress theme for PCLinuxOS designed by community member geminiguy
After a two-week delay, the Fedora Project team finally announced, two minutes ago, the release of Fedora 11, also known as Leonidas. The multitude of new features and improvements in this new version made the waiting time seem even longer, especially for dedicated fans. Well, at least the buzz from Ubuntu and Mandriva is slowly fading away, so Linux users can concentrate better on Fedora 11.
eXo Platform SAS, one of Europe’s leading open source companies, today announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with Red Hat’s JBoss Community Portal to create a comprehensive, standards-compliant, open source portal platform that will serve as the underlying technology for eXo’s portfolio of content, collaboration, and social networking enterprise solutions.
I’ve read about morphing windows on the Wiki but I think that they would undermine consistency a bit. I’m attaching a mockup to this mail, but I’m so bad at using Gimp that much of what I’m proposing will be left to your ability of understanding me. :-)
Ubuntu One Beta, the Dropbox type of service by Canonical has finally kicked off, bt not for all. When my invitation arrived I quickly moved on to test it.
The developers behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution aim to significantly improve boot performance. Their ambitious goal for 2010 is to reduce total boot time to 10 seconds.
I spotted a new magazine in WHSmiths today. Its was called Ubuntu-User and was made by the same people that make Linux-Magazine.
MIPS Technologies announced that source code for the Android port to MIPS released by Embedded Alley last week would be made publicly available within 60 days. MIPS also joined the Open Embedded Software Foundation consortium supporting Android, and announced that VioSoft will support the MIPS/Android platform with its Arriba tools.
Atmel is sampling a faster version of its low-power ARM926EJ-S-based processor, offered with a free Linux BSP. The SAM9G10 ramps up to a 266MHz clock rate compared to the SAM9261-S's 188MHz, boosts bus frequency to 133MHz, up from 94MHz, and consumes only 100mW in full-power mode, claims the company.
SiRF Technology is shipping a Linux-compatible navigation system-on-chip (SoC) that integrates a application processor and a "location engine" equipped with both GPS and Galileo satellite tracking. The "SiRFatlasIV" is billed as a lower-cost version of SiRF's SiRFprima SoC, offering the same 500MHz ARM11 core and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, says SiRF.
US embedded hardware OEM KwikByte is shipping a low-cost, tiny embedded Linux system designed for surveillance and machine vision. KwikByte demonstrated the system running open-source packages providing features such as streaming video server and computer vision.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Mitrionics already introduced the world to hybrid server performance based on parallel FPGAs. Now, the company is hoping to make the programming of such unique platforms more palatable through a Linux software development kit.
I'm impressed. There's a few rough edges and some obvious short-term hacks, but overall the Pre has the appearance of being a well-engineered distribution. It's recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't. Since it seems to be possible to gain root by entering the developer mode, I suspect that modifying the firmware image isn't especially difficult. It'll be interesting to see what happens when GSM ones appear.
And with Netbooks retailing under $400, compared to Microsoft Intel makes hardly any profit at all. So Microsoft has to die.
This is a huge change for Intel, which has for decades acted as Microsoft’s bitch, doing pretty much whatever Redmond demanded for fear of being written-out of the next Windows PC hardware spec in favor of AMD or even IBM. But that was the old Microsoft. The Microsoft of today isn’t nearly as powerful, whether they yet know it or not.
At Computex, Acer announced that it would use Android together with an Intel chip. Other firms are expected to follow suit. Intel is also pushing another version of Linux, called Moblin. Its long partnership with Microsoft notwithstanding, Intel does not seem to care what operating system netbooks use, provided they contain the firm’s chips.
Linux may also prove popular for tablets, a market that Apple is likely to energise when it finally launches its much-awaited new device (though any Apple tablet will run its own operating system). The reason it did not happen this week, some say, was that either the tablet or Mr Jobs, who would like to present it personally, is not yet ready for action. Unlike Godot, Mr Jobs and the new gadget are likely to appear eventually—probably in time for the holiday season.
ARM, based in Cambridge, England, is a potential beneficiary of Android’s success because Microsoft’s Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 don’t run on ARM-based computers.
“Microsoft going forward may have to work on an ARM-based solution,” said Daiwa’s Huang. “If Microsoft doesn’t want to see Google Android get into the PC market, they will have to support ARM; otherwise, ARM will go perfectly with Android.”
All those devices are based on the Android or Linux operation systems because of cost-efficiency issues but also because of lack of support from Microsoft. (This was also confirmed by Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's corporate VP for original equipment manufacturers during his interview at Computex). Intel seems to have let those challenges emerge even though it has enough of a shield to have avoided this competition from the starting point.
Some of the Android usage agreements also allow the Google logo to be used; a netbook or notebook with a Google logo on it would be more recognizable to consumers than a notebook running another Linux variant like Ubuntu.
The Linux version starts at $279 and can be upgraded from an Intel N270 Atom CPU to the slightly-faster N280 CPU and the RAM can be bumped from 1GB to 2GB. The XP version starts at $329 and features the same CPU upgrade option, although the RAM is stuck at 1GB thanks to Microsoft’s weird netbook rules.
Wow, on June 17, 2009, it'll be an entire year since reddit went open source. If you weren't around, or missed the hacky stop-motion video announcing it, reddit has been open source for a year now. See for yourself at code.reddit.
In a perfect world, data would all be easily transportable and consumable. The world is not perfect, and that's why the work that open source data integration vendor Jitterbit does, is valuable to many organizations. I first wrote about Jitterbit around the time of their 1.0 release in 2006 ,and now they're gearing up with their 3.0 release.
A new open source-style project to promote Open Source Sensing has been started, with the goal of bringing the benefits of a bottom-up, decentralized approach to sensing for security and environmental purposes.
WSO2, a Sri Lankan software firm, is starting a free 'summer school' this month on open source software and service oriented architecture (SOA), the company said. The eight week program will help at enterprise IT architects and developers to become more familiar with SOA concepts, technologies and best practices, the company said.
WSO2 says the developer community has been hit by the global economic downturn.
Open-source experts are a rare breed in the country and we found one in the unlikeliest place — a farm.
The world of open-source development could be divided if the European Commission succeeds in passing a law extending consumer protection rules to software, according to experts.
The Commission proposes software companies be held liable in the EU for the security and efficacy of their products.
David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT Research at Ovum, thinks this may lead to a situation boosting current open-source vendors' business models, but making it more difficult for independent developers to thrive.
Everyone knows Pygame is a super-fast way to produce cross-platform games. But its one major flaw is that it's very slow to do simple operations such as scaling, rotating and recoloring. In fact, even making extensive use of transparency can be a bit slow, so I've produced a new graphics toolkit that makes all those things extremely fast, and I've called it Gloss.
Three open source products are aiming to reduce the barrier to entry for customers wishing to build native mobile applications using Web development skills alone. These products are PhoneGap, Rhomobile, and Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile.
Ultimately, our development team will be putting a spam-removal system in where spam should not get through at all, and if it does, volunteer moderators will be able to remove it and block the offending spammer regardless of the time of day. This system will also be put in place for the direct messaging system and the forums, too.
Organizers of the upcoming OpenSource World conference broadened the event program and are offering free admission, hoping to attract more attendees in a time of slashed travel budgets and increased competition from similar shows.
Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, a well-funded startup that provides commercial support for Hadoop, also weighed in on how it will make use of Yahoo!'s distribution:"The general availability of Yahoo!’s Hadoop source code helps make Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop even more robust and scalable, and we will continue to collaborate with Yahoo! to include their tested source code in our commercial distribution,” said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. “Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop is a complete, enterprise-ready distribution inclusive of key tools, utilities, and full service and support, to help enterprises deploy and manage the Hadoop platform for large-scale data processing and management.”
The Apache Hadoop project offers the promise of being able to manage and process large volumes of data quickly. It's a project that is used by big Web titans like Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Facebook, and it's about to get a critical new tool to help it ingest even more data.
People who are new to content management systems find it a little overwhelming as they try to figure out which CMS is right for them. Packt Publishing (news, site) has released a book that hopes to help people make some sense out of so many choices.
click2try (http://www.click2try.com), a community site that makes it easy to try and use Open Source software, today announced it has added Sakai CLE to its online catalog of Open Source applications.
After several years of trying to find a good note-taking solution, I’ve finally settled on a local installation of MediaWiki on my Ubuntu laptop for managing information relevant to my academic and personal pursuits. Below, I outline my experiences with the software, and explain why the ease of deploying it and similar packages on Ubuntu is one of the platform’s greatest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, strengths.
Since college, I’ve tried at least half-a-dozen different approaches to taking notes, and until now was less than satisfied with each of them. Handwritten notes are difficult to store and search through. OpenOffice is bulky for notetaking, while plain text files offer little opportunity for mark-up. The various note-taking applications that I tried, like Tomboy, were decent, but none offered exactly what I wanted.
Mozilla has announced the release of Add-on Collections, groups of add-ons that all relate to a particular topic.
The ability to completely customize your browser with thousands of add-ons is one of the best features of Firefox, and highlights the talent, dedication, and innovation of our great community. With thousands of add-ons and close to 1.5 billion downloads, Mozilla has been working hard this year to provide a great experience for both add-on users and developers.
As was recently demonstrated by Microsoft, Iwin Games and a number of other companies, anybody can install an extension into Firefox, and those extensions are not limited in what they can do.
Now this really isn't a knock against Firefox. The extensions system is a dream come true. However, in it's current form it's also a timebomb waiting to happen. All you need is one creative virus maker, or malicious corporation, and boom! Firefox ceases to be the secure juggernaut it is and becomes the prostitute of whomever wants to take it over.
As Microsoft's .Net extension proves, it's not that hard to use the extensions system to take Firefox and turn it into the same kind of virus magnet that Internet Explorer is, only much worse. Now I'm not saying we need to abandon Firefox, but rather that two key things need to happen.
Years ago I proclaimed open source would never be relevant in the application market. Now I work for an open-source applications company.
Tom Watson is that rare thing: a net-savvy MP. So his decision to step down as minister means that our loss is all the greater.
During the Public Administrations Innovator barcamp I have been interviewed by Cogo Gigi, one of the organizers, to talk about sustainable innovation in software for public administrations.
Open source activists are praising the Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source motion passed by the City of Vancouver last month. City Councillor Andrea Reimer provides an update on what to expect next.
A spokesman for IBM's open-source effort in the Asia-Pacific region says he is excited at the new opportunity opened up for open-source products by the collapse of the G2009 bulk agreement with Microsoft.
The Homeland Security Department is funding a program that will help federal, state and local agencies better understand their options for using open-source software.
DHS' Science and Technology Directorate will fund the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) project, which will start with a one-year, $1.5 million contract and possible additional years to follow. The University of Southern Mississippi and the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) will conduct the work, and the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command will handle the contracting and help with guidance for the program.
Editor's note: it actually does not appear to specifically make open source illegal but the side effect may be that. Unless they are CCHIT certified.
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology will present two free Web conferences June 16 and 17 to gather comments on plans to refine its certification of electronic health records software.
Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money? Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech, and in particular my remarks about a potential “open access compact”. I will take this opportunity to explain why I think that the answer to both questions is “no”.
My arguments will be that almost all theses are created with the “book” or “journal” metaphor and based on flat text, flat images and little if any linking or semantics. This is an increasingly outdated way of communicating to humans in today’s pervasive web where we learn to interact with information from the cradle upwards.
One of the things that interests me at the moment is the way open source ideas are proving hugely useful when considering areas like economics and environmentalism
Villarreal has access to the Bluestone interview and several others like it through the Open Source Teaching Project, a Tennessee-based program that helps students make real-life connections to academic content. The program sends interviewers to speak faceto- face with experts in a range of fields who share their passion for their work, explain what they do on a daily basis, and suggest steps students can take to achieve similar careers. The interviews are then posted online, free for anyone to access, accompanied by teacher resources, including lesson plans and blogs.
The Open Source Teaching Project (OST) mobilizes students to interview successful professionals so that they can inspire and inform the education and career decisions of other students. This free, digital media platform is provided for the benefit of the public, with a particular focus on reaching middle, high school, and post-secondary learners.
The Rice University-based International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON) on June 1 introduced the GoodNanoGuide, an online, community-driven wiki for information about the safe handling of nanomaterials.
Picture the lighting and chillers of commercial buildings being controlled by a system designed in the same way as Mozilla’s Firefox — through open source, the collaborative method of developing software source code. While we’ve covered open source-based home area energy management systems, the OpenLynx project, started by Anno Scholten, vice president of business development for NovusEdge, is looking to tackle the underlying software that controls the energy consumption of massive commercial buildings.
So here is the Great Open Source experiment:
The original versions of "Crystal Earth" scripts and "The War for Truth" are available for purchase and download through the Kindle bookstore AND the open source version can be attained by any writers willing to undertake the project.
The NetBeans developers have announced the start of the NetBeans 6.7 Community Acceptance Survey and are asking users to provide feedback on the current release candidate.
Few things can spark more religious fervour amongst programmers than the mention of a goto statement. PHP has stepped into the middle of the firefight by announcing that it will be implementing goto functionality in version 5.3.
Do you like your office automation software to be a free and Open Source as your Sugar Learning Platform? Then rejoice now that Eric Bachard has helped create OOo4Kids, an Open Office customized for 7-12 year old children that works on the XO laptop...
Governments around the world are considering implementing or even mandating open standards policies. They believe these policies will provide economic, socio–political, and technical benefits. In this article, we analyze the failure of the Massachusetts’s open standards policy as applied to document formats. We argue it failed due to the lack of running code. Running code refers to multiple independent, interoperable implementations of an open standard. With running code, users have choice in their adoption of a software product and consequently economic and technological benefits. We urge governments to incorporate a “running code” requirement when adopting an open standards policy.
Remember how Elsevier and Merck were caught putting out a fake journal that had articles favoring Merck drugs, implying peer reviewed articles that weren't? Soon afterwards, it came out that Elsevier had a whole division for such things. However, following an internal investigation, it looks like Elsevier is backtracking a bit and saying that, while the group's practices were problematic, most weren't as egregious as the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM)" that was created by Merck and Elsevier.
The guy appealed to the Supreme Court, who has declined to hear the case, meaning that the ruling stands for the time being. So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer.
The European Commission is putting pressure on the Council and the new European Parliament for the swift adoption of the Telecoms Package. Such adoption would mean that Internet access could legally be restricted by broadband providers and would not allow for proper scrutiny of the law or any consideration of the implications of Amendment 138.
This is precisely what net neutrality is all about. It doesn't matter what the bits are, you pay purely on the basis of quantity or speed you want. Attempts by BT and Virgin to pretend that high-quality video streaming services are somehow different are just a pathetic attempt to try it on with authorities and users that don't know any better. We do, so we need to call their bluff.
According to an article in The Guardian. a recent UK government research report on downloading and copyright enforcement contained some 'dodgy figures'. Interestingly, the report claims far heavier 'losses' from downloading than the music industry's own figures. And some quietly released figures from the BPI show digital music sales going up, and only a small recessionary downturn in overall revenue.
Earlier this year, we couldn't figure out how Facebook's lawsuit against Power.com made any sense. Power.com tried to aggregate various social networking accounts in a single place, so you could manage them all at once through a single interface. Yet Facebook charged the company with all sorts of complaints, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
Freedom is not about having power over someone else (or what someone else has), it’s about oneself (and one’s possessions) being free of someone else’s power.
Copyright and patent are privileges that give holders power over others (and what they may or may not do with their possessions). Copyleft is about restoring the individual’s freedoms suspended by these privileges. Copyleft is not about giving the author, recipient or user of software, power over others or others’ computers.
Kyle Brady writes, "Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so. A win for students, programmers, and copyfighters nationwide!"
ISPs and the entertainment industries are in negotiations to set up a so-called ‘pirate review board’ in Denmark. The body will oversee and mediate in cases of copyright infringement by alleged online pirates and try to stop large organizations ending up in court, such as in The Pirate Bay and AllofMP3 domain blocking cases.
Stand back from the media frenzy concentrating on Labour’s woes for a moment, and ask yourself what these elections mean for digital rights.
Several parties that broadly supported digital rights concerns did well in this election, including, in the UK, UKIP and the Greens. The Liberal Democrats also had a fair showing.