Dragoon keeps talking about “exploitation of open source software” and of “Linux”. Yes, he uses the word “exploit” (or “exploiting” and “exploitation”) quite a lot in this talk when referring to use. He must be thinking of Novell’s own attitude towards “open source”” and “Linux”. Novell is exploiting these. Also notice how more than once he has a hard time saying “open source software” (he says “open software”).
We could go on making criticisms about other things, such as the fact that he talks fluff-speak like “going forward” and he is using shamed analysts (Goldman Sachs for example) while pretending that they are not like PR, by actually saying so. Experience suggests otherwise.
I found the latest release of this distribution to be a solid offering. Some of the previous issues regarding codecs have been corrected, the new KDE desktop is light and fast. I like that openSUSE gives users the option to use the Smolt system profiler and YaST is an excellent control centre. The distro’s work with virtualization is great and there is a large selection of software available on the CD. The only thing I’d like to change about this distro is in regards to the package manager. The existing YaST tool for handling software is effective, but I’d like to see a more novice-friendly program added. Ubuntu offers a good example of this where they have a beginner-friendly Software Center and a separate menu entry for Synaptic. The way Linux handles software packages is, in my opinion, one of the operating system’s greatest strengths and it’s important not to frighten people away from it. Over-all, I see openSUSE 11.3 as a great release, possibly the best we’ve seen of the lizard yet.
As we argued yesterday, OpenSUSE volunteers out to fork and/or rebrand; people who work on SUSE for money ought to apply for a job somewhere like Red Hat. Novell is not the place to be at the moment and many people avoid SUSE because of the Novell affiliation. █
Summary: A bunch of news about patents, including an invaluable admission from one Microsoft attorney that mathematics ought not to be patentable
SOFTWARE patents are an abominable thing, unless one is a patent lawyer or a software monopoly in one area or another. In the industry, the argument over software patents is a class war, it’s not an argument between Free software and proprietary software. Ghabuntuwrote aboutNew Zealand's situation when it comes to software patents over there. Separately, the site’s main editor said: “I am no legal expert nor an attorney, but what bugs my mind is how the future is going to be like given how governments keep doling out patents like biscuits to mega corporations.”
Africans have a lot of reasons to dislike patents and not a single one to like them (unless the speaker or false representative happens to be working for a multinational company). More patents were granted in 2009 than in prior years, according to Legal Times. This just means more monopolies, not increased innovation.
The number of utility patents granted by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office increased in 2009 after a two-year decline.
[...]
IBM Corp. received the most utility patents last year, with 4,887, followed by Samsung Electronics Co. (3,592); Microsoft Corp. (2,929); Canon K.K. (2,241) and Hitachi Ltd. (2,146).
Groklaw has found this article from NewsWeek — an article that talks about American creativity and the impact artificial limitations have had on it:
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
[...]
In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.
[...]
Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
“Without discounting the theories about education in the article,” explained Pamela Jones from Groklaw, “I wonder if anyone is thinking about the effects of IP law on US students’ creativity? They can’t watch a movie, after all, without being warned that the FBI will find them and punish them if they do anything at all with the movie’s contents. A lot of truly creative YouTube mashed up videos were killed by Hollywood too. It sends a message to young people that they are not allowed to be creative; only a certain “priesthood”, so to speak in Hollywood are allowed to be. Creativity builds on what went before, but now there are high gates and locks to prevent it from happening.”
There are lessons to be learned here about the patent system too. How can a software developer find encouragement and peace of mind? The developer is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of software patents that he or she does not even know about.
There ought to be examples other than software where patents do more harm than good. Groklaw gave one example from Europe:
At the European Patent Office in Munich, there are some tasty patents on the table for debate. The office’s appeals board is debating whether patents on broccoli and tomatoes can be allowed.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo has petitioned the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to sit en banc to re-hear its statutory subject matter challenge to the Prometheus patents. (U.S. Patents 6,355,623 and 6,680,302).
The Prometheus Claims are directed toward an iterative approach of dosing an active drug ingredient (6-thioguanine). Most of the claims are centered around three ordered-steps of:
1. administering a dose of the drug to the subject;
2. determining the amount of the drug in the subject’s blood; and
3. re-calibrating the drug dosage.
Jones explains (in News Picks, thus no permanent link):
This is the case about administering a drug, taking a blood test, then recalibrating. Or as the petition puts it, the patents “attempt to exclude the medical community from using test results of naturally-occurring human metabolism, making physicians and medical researchers infringers simply for thinking about the correlations between patient health and levels of certain chemicals in a patient’s blood.” And you thought software patents were stupidly damaging. This patent, the petition tells us, can be infringed simply by thinking. And how, pray tell, do you enforce your patent? Believe it or not, they sued a researcher at the Mayo Clinic even though she “was not concerned about Prometheus’ claimed levels. Because she had seen those levels and not erased her mind, however, Prometheus accused her of infringement without her having to do anything with her natural and unavoidable mental recognition.”
But that’s silly, I hear you saying. That can’t be right, can it? The expert for the patent holder testified that merely seeing a document with test results infringes even if a doctor “crumples it up, throws it away, reads it, acts on it, doesn’t act on it, any assumptions you want to come up with.” The lower court had said the patents were not valid because they preempted all use of a natural phenomenon, but the court of appeals had reversed. When the US Supreme Court ruled on Bilski, immediately thereafter it vacated Prometheus and remanded.
Separately, Groklaw helps show that Microsoft too is dissatisfied with software patents, which it compares to maths. Here is the source of information:
While there are at least eight (8) cases before the Federal Circuit that could be the court’s first word on patentable subject matter after the Supreme Court’s Bilski v. Kappos opinion, my prediction is that the first decision to provide additional guidance for computer software will be Research Corp. Tech (RCT) v. Microsoft. Furthermore, I predict that the court will expand/clarify the scope of patentable subject matter to clearly include subject matter that has no realistic application outside of the computer art. There are several reasons for these predictions.
Jones is again offering a long interpretation where she says:
If you read the 2008 decision [PDF] by the court of appeals, which sent the case back to a new judge, which is how it ends up back before them, you’ll be puzzled, in that the description of the patent is that it’s algorithms, math. In fact in oral argument, which you can get from this page, choose oral argument, then oral argument recordings from the drop down list, then type in Microsoft in the case name block and 2010-06-09 as the date, you’ll get to the mp3 and can hear Microsoft’s attorney pointing out that the patent is just math. He makes a distinction between software and math, which I consider illusory, but when he tells the panel that the patent is math, one of them say, yes, but it doesn’t preempt it. Then Microsoft’s attorney says, but when you remove the math, there’s nothing left. Assuming that is so, how could this case possibly be used to broaden Bilski? Rather, it would seem to directly contradict it, should that happen.
The author seems to think that if it’s math, it’s not abstract. But if you read Bilski, beginning on p. 18, I don’t see how anyone can take the view that algorithms are patentable in and of themselves, so if this is nothing but, what in the world would it mean to allow it to be patentable? In short, I hope either the description or this prediction is wrong about the outcome, but if it’s correct, I hope Microsoft appeals, and oddly enough, if they do, I’ll be rooting for them.
Summary: Not even the Ombudsman can give access to a process of a conspiracy of foreign companies working to harm European people behind closed doors
EUROPE is under attack by ACTA proponents such as Pedro Valesco-Martins, Paul Rübig, and Luc Pierre Devigne. That last person was recently fired or simply decided to leave. His political career is probably tarnished due to his advocacy and defence of the ACTA, which nobody in Europe seems to actually want. According to this response to Ante Wessels[PDF], the European Ombudsman is of no use here.
This mirrors our recent experiences with the European Ombudsman, which failed to stop American lobbyists from derailing Europe’s interests, let alone show their subversion of European documents/charters. Europe needs an Ombudsman with a strong spine in order for it to be effective and justify its existence.
Citizens have a clear interest in being informed about ACTA, EU Ombudsman concludes
Brussels, 27 July 2010 — According to the EU Ombudsman, citizens have a clear interest in being informed about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Despite this, he concludes for formal reasons that there was no maladministration by the Council of the European Union when it denied access to the ACTA documents. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) had filed a complaint with the Ombudsman concerning the Council’s refusal to grant access to ACTA documents.
The Ombudsman “agrees that the conclusion of the ACTA may indeed make it necessary for the EU to propose and enact legislation. In that case, the ACTA would constitute the sole or the major consideration underpinning that legislation, and citizens would have a clear interest in being informed about the ACTA.”
“This is a loophole, it is possible to force legislation upon democracies while the public can not scrutinize all documents.” –Ante WesselsWhile citizens have a clear interest in being informed about ACTA, they do not get access to the ACTA documents. The Ombudsman observes that, although ACTA “could have far-reaching legislative consequences for the EU, this does not mean that the procedure for concluding the ACTA is the same as a legislative procedure, and that the rules governing the latter (including those with regard to public access to documents as set out in the Turco case) apply by analogy to the former.”
FFII analyst Ante Wessels comments: “This is a loophole, it is possible to force legislation upon democracies while the public can not scrutinize all documents. The EU legislation on access to documents needs to be repaired. In the meantime, parliaments should not accept the usage of this loophole. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties stipulates that the history of a treaty plays a role in the interpretation of that treaty. Without full disclosure, parliaments will have to decide on a proposal with unknown aspects, a dark horse.”
Background information
Behind closed doors, the European Union, United States, Japan and other trade partners are negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA will contain new international norms for the enforcement of copyrights, trade mark rights, patents and other exclusive rights.
The FFII endorses the Washington Communique: International Experts Find that Pending Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Threatens Public Interests
The FFII is a not-for-profit association, dedicated to the development of information goods for the public benefit, based on copyright, free competition, and open standards. More than 1,000 members, 3,500 companies and 100,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy questions concerning exclusion rights in data processing.
Summary: IBM names Microsoft as a source of the complaints (or at least their financier) which target GNU/Linux-powered mainframes
GNU/Linux has several people who may sometimes seem like its friends when obviously they are not. For starters there’s Florian Müller and there are others like Bill Beebe, who sometimes act as apologists for SCO and even this week show some disregard for GNU/Linux (Beebe does not use GNU/Linux and neither does Müller by all indications).
As we pointed out yesterday, Müller is again taking shots at IBM (mass-mailing journalists and posting in several places). He is still doing this today, even minutes ago. He is like a true lobbyist and he helps Microsoft’s agenda, whether he acknowledges it or not. Earlier this month it was Kevin McBride who also helped Microsoft’s agenda by boosting SCO's case. SCO is like Microsoft's patent troll, but this one uses copyright allegations and sues IBM using Microsoft funds. Groklaw responds to ZDNet’s poor reporting by emphasising: “Kevin isn’t SCO now. His brother isn’t either.”
“What strikes me is that the price in June was going up until June 10, when Stewart ruled for Novell (look at the activity for *that* day), and then it dropped back to 0.04 the next day, and that was the highest until July 9, when Kevin McBride posted claims about Linux.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawDarl was of course sacked. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) made a mistake similar to that of ZDNet and Groklaw corrects him by stressing that “this isn’t SCO talking, in that the brothers McBride are no longer associated with SCO, unless SCO’s current leadership wishes to take credit for this event.”
Separately, Groklaw points out that SCO’s stock rose as a result of this McBride action. “I find this mezmerizing,” says Pamela Jones, “this chart of SCO’s daily share price. What strikes me is that the price in June was going up until June 10, when Stewart ruled for Novell (look at the activity for *that* day), and then it dropped back to 0.04 the next day, and that was the highest until July 9, when Kevin McBride posted claims about Linux. Then you see the price go up to a high today of 0.10. Coincidence?”
Later on Groklaw wrote about the TurboHercules case, noting: “First SCO and now TurboHercules. See a pattern, anyone? I certainly do. Microsoft and its “satellite proxies”. Someone needs to investigate that as an antitrust violation, in my view, using litigation and regulatory process to harm a competitor.”
IBM countered in its own statement that the EC’s accusations “are being driven by some of IBM’s largest competitors — led by Microsoft — who want to further cement the dominance of Wintel servers by attempting to mimic aspects of IBM mainframes without making the substantial investments IBM has made.”
In a statement, IBM said it “intends to cooperate fully” with the inquires. But it also asserts that the investigations were actually triggered by Microsoft (MSFT). “Let there be no confusion whatsoever: there is no merit to the claims being made by Microsoft and its satellite proxies,” IBM said. “IBM is fully entitled to enforce its intellectual property rights and protect the investments we have made in our technologies. Competition and intellectual property laws are complementary and designed to promote competition and innovation, and IBM fully supports these policies. But IBM will not allow the fruits of its innovation and investment to be pirated by its competition through baseless allegations.”
IBM, based in Armonk, New York, said in a statement that “there is no merit to the claims being made by Microsoft and its satellite proxies.”
“Certain IBM competitors which have been unable to win in the marketplace through investments in fundamental innovations now want regulators to create for them a market position that they have not earned,” IBM said.
Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, said in an e-mail that the company invests in startup companies such as T3 to give customers greater choice. The company isn’t a party to T3’s complaint against IBM, he said.
“We do share T3’s belief that there needs to be greater openness and choice for customers in the mainframe market,” Shaw said. “Customers tell us that they want greater interoperability between the mainframe and other platforms.”
Notice the wording. He does not deny Microsoft’s role. “Microsoft wasn’t a party to SCO v. IBM, either, but it gave money that made it possible for it to happen,” Jones explained. “You don’t have to be a party to be involved.” █
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft
Symantec isn’t sure why Iran and the other countries are reporting so many infections. “The most we can say is whoever developed these particular threats was targeting companies in those geographic areas,” Levy said.
[...]
Because Symantec can see the IP address used by machines that try to connect with the command and control servers, it can tell which companies have been infected. “Not surprisingly, infected machines include a variety of organizations that would use SCADA software and systems, which is clearly the target of the attackers,” the company said in its blog post Thursday.
Stuxnet spreads via USB devices. When an infected USB stick is viewed on a Windows machine, the code looks for a Siemens system and copies itself to any other USB devices it can find.
This ought to at least arouse suspicion that targeted attacks are a possibility, with a political agenda somewhat likely. It’s not as though it didn’t happen before. Last year we also found out that Iran uses Novell and Microsoft software to potentially make bombs.
In other news, Windows Live is more of a spying tool than most people realise. IM is never private, either (Skype IM is monitored by Chinese authorities for example). That’s why the US government at one point objected to giving ICQ to the Russians. Anyway, about Microsoft:
Microsoft has taken Hotmail and Messenger accounts and turned them into Windows Live Spaces accounts. What’s more worrisome, MS has also taken the liberty of converting your Messenger contacts into Friends. It then shares information about these new Friends with each other. To try to prevent this sharing (and, based on my tests, you can’t), you have to navigate a mind-boggling labyrinth of privacy settings.
It has a bad odor to it. When I use Facebook, I fully expect that other people will be able to see what I’m doing. No problem — I would never use Facebook for sensitive business communications. But when I use Messenger, I expect it to be as private as a phone call.
Summary: A look at how much it took to stop Conlin’s action against Microsoft and accusations that currently fly from her opponent’s direction
LAST year we pointed out that Microsoft has the habit of paying huge amounts of money (or offering a job) to its adversaries because it helps keep them quiet and essentially removes their knowledge from the ‘gene pool’ of Microsoft critics. The Comes vs Microsoft case put a lot of pressure on Microsoft because it helped expose a huge number of illegal activities which we’ve been covering here since 2007. Roxanne Conlin was the lead lady in this case. One might say that Microsoft bribed her millions of dollars to take down the antitrust exhibits from the site and settle. Back around 2007 we contacted her office. We did that a few times some years ago (regarding this same case) and never received a response. Silence was probably part of the settlement.
According to this new article (now removed from the Web), Conlin’s may have received a lot of money out of this case.
The lawsuit filed last month in Polk County said Conlin signed an agreement with the Microsoft Litigation Consortium that called for the group to receive 20 percent of attorney fees awarded in the case. The agreement also said disputes were to be resolved through arbitration. The lawsuit said Conlin has refused to enter into arbitration.
The article from the Chicago Tribune was also removed, but here is a snippet:
The lawsuit filed last month in Polk County says Conlin signed an agreement with the Microsoft Litigation Consortium that called for the group to receive 20 …
In IowaPolitics.com we found accusations of “special interests” in Conlin’s case and the accuser is Grassley, who is no friend of Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4]. From the article:
First she leaves the country to rake in special-interest money and now U.S. Senate candidate Roxanne Conlin is headed for Las Vegas for a gathering of the Who’s Who of liberal special interest groups.
Conlin is scheduled to speak to a pro-abortion group, the Women’s Campaign Forum, as part of the Netroots Nation event on Saturday. The Netroots Nation includes Moveon.org, the American Civil Liberties Union, ActBlue, Emily’s List and a coalition of organized labor unions and liberal activist groups.
“Once again, Roxanne Conlin says one thing and does another. She’s promised not to accept any special interest money yet her entire trip to Las Vegas revolves around special interests,” said Eric Woolson, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s re-election campaign. “The sponsors of Netroots Nation are special interest groups committed to electing liberals and it’s to them that Roxanne Conlin would be beholden.”
Another new article that mentions Grassley says that “Lawyers seek cut of Conlin’s fees from Microsoft case”
Des Moines lawyer Roxanne Conlin has been sued by a national group of plaintiffs lawyers for not sharing with them a portion of the $75 million in fees that she and a Minnesota law firm received in a settlement in Iowa’s civil antitrust case against Microsoft.
A statement from Conlin, who is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in the fall election, says the lawsuit is politically inspired.
That may be a possibility. Grassley does have his own interests too. We are not disputing Conlin’s integrity, but we are interested in knowing just how much money Microsoft gave to Conlin only weeks after the trial began and Microsoft’s embarrassing secrets were made publicly known. To put things in context:
Grassley faces a challenge from Democrat Roxanne Conlin of Des Moines in the November election.
In the Senate race, Grassley, a five-term senator, took in $630,460 during the period, compared with $205,720 for Democratic challenger Roxanne Conlin of Des Moines.
Grassley reported having $5.7 million on hand, compared with Conlin’s $851,014. Conlin won a three-way primary.
It would be handy to know just how much of Microsoft’s money was passed to Conlin, who since the settlement has said not a thing about Microsoft, so this prominent critic was essentially removed from the ‘gene pool’. █
Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences?
Is it market share, perceived ease of use, slick marketing overtures, users wanting to use what they already know? This list might explain why people might choose OS X or Windows.
But what approach to computing (and life) prompts a person to use a Linux box on a daily basis? I’ll share my insights based on personal experiences and other observations accumulated over years of living the Linux lifestyle full time.
You get to spend countless hours dealing with “me myself and I” users who always seem to have issues that can escalate to bringing the world as we know it to an end if not promptly attended to. The pay is bad and the work hours are long. Simply put system administration is a job for those who love and have a passion for administering computers and their users.
Measures to optimise the power management code and fully support the Turbo Core function of recent AMD six-core processors increase the data throughput and processing speed of Linux 2.6.35. Further kernel additions include tracing interfaces for KVM, another kernel configuration program, and functions for de-fragmenting the working memory.
You can find CDargs on most Debian-based distros, so if you’re using Debian, Linux Mint, or Ubuntu you should be able to just grab it with sudo apt-get install cdargs. It’s also available on Fedora, and you should be able to find it through the openSUSE Build Service as well.
Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here’s how to do it.
If you’ve read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui’s chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I’ve known of it, I’ve used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.
The main purpose of the reviews published on this site is to give readers a good idea of what they would experience if they actually downloaded and installed the distribution on their computer. It is, therefore, necessary to highlight good features, or features I think will lead to a positive user experience. It is also necessary to highlight badly implemented features, or features that could give a negative user experience. For this review, let’s begin by looking at the features I think you’ll like on Sabayon (5.3).
The organisers of the DebConf10, the upcoming annual Debian Developer conference, announced that there will again be a Debian Day for everybody interested in free software. It will be on the 1st of August at the Columbia University in New York City. During this event, there will be a full day of talks on several subjects such as free software in government, design and free software, free software advocacy as well as string of talks about the Debian project and operating system. Debian Day is free of charge, but a registration via e-mail is required to ease the organisation of that event. More information is available on http://debianday.org/.
Imagine the following situation: you find yourself with ten to twenty brand new Notebooks and the opportunity to install them with Debian and customise to your own taste. In any case it would be great fun to manually perform the Debian installation and configuration on each Notebook. This is where Debian Preseed comes into play.
Hidden away in a bland update about terms & conditions, Google’s Android Developer Blog has revealed the next phase in Google’s plans to make Android a little more pleasing to the mass market—direct carrier billing for app purchases made via the Android Market.
Although Android itself is under an Apache licence, within Android are GPL licensed components such as the Linux kernel. This means that although vendors can freely use Google created layers such as the Dalvik VM, user interface layer and other services, the operating system’s kernel needs to be made available as source code to anyone who receives the code under the GPL licence.
Though still in its initial stages of development, Tab Candy is an interesting new Firefox 4.0 feature, which has every potential to get adopted by every single browser out there. Like for example, the tabs itself were invented by Opera, and now it’s a default and a must have feature in web browsers.
OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 was released on June 4 and a new master workspace was branched off for the upcoming 3.3 on June 5. The code in this branch will be stabilized and later become the product release that will find its way onto your desktops.
With the feature and UI freeze of June 24, only fixes will go into this new OOO330 release code branch. New features will be merged into the DEV300 development code line as 3.3 is readied for release.
Have you looked at the new Microsoft Office 2010 yet? How many of its few, new features does your company really need? And are these features worth the investment? Here are five reasons your company doesn’t need to purchase Office 2010.
On the surface, it would seem Oracle, as the new proprietor of all things Sun, is now the master of Java’s fate. Besides inventing Java, Sun had steered important Java technologies such as the GlassFish application server, which has served as the open source reference implementation of enterprise Java. Sun also held power in the Java Community Process (JCP), the official scheme for amending Java.
Simon Phipps is one of those technology purists that makes you wish you were even half as enthusiastic as he is about your favourite subject. As Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer/evangelist he was a welcome addition to JavaOne events, where he would typically install himself in the press room alongside the technical journalists and file Flip-video reports on his own company’s event with tremendous gusto.
Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants.
Open source is what happens when several different people choose to work together on the same code base rather than working separately. They use an OSI-approved licence and gather as an open source community around the resulting free-software commons. Each of them is there for their own reasons; each covers their own costs and contributes the code they choose to. There is no pooling of funds to pay for work to be done because everyone is solely responsible for their own costs.
SynapSense is one of a handful of companies designing data center energy management systems, which use sensors to collect environmental data from inside data centers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now, could have been sued for their non-infringing or fair use activities.
[...]
The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.
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