Links: Women in Free Software, India's “National Browser” is Free Software, Apple Calls Firefox Home “Adults Only”, OpenSolaris Blues, WordPress on GPL, New Wine...
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-20 08:16:11 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-20 08:16:11 UTC
Summary: News about Free software and Open Source, taken over the past 5 days or so
- Vodafone Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Innovation
Vodafone Group will make its location based services software open source on http://oss.wayfinder.com. The code will be made available on github. The aim is to offer other organisations the opportunity to use a code base which has been developed over the past decade so that they can build new and innovative navigation products which widen choice for consumers.
- Adobe Announces Open-Source Collaboration with Sourceforge
Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called "Open@Adobe."
- Women in free software: Recommendations from the Women's Caucus
Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community. Those that attended the summit formed the Women's Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community. Today, we are publishing the Caucus's initial findings and recommendations.
- Remix This Game — a Free Software Experiment
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Web Browsers
- India Gets a “National Browser”, EpicBrowser – Your Grandma Will Love this
Well, a bunch of geeks still believe that none of the standard browsers cater to India needs and this is what they have done – launched a browser for the Indian market.
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Mozilla
- Can Mozilla Deliver an Open App Store?
In a talk delivered last Wednesday at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada, Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs, asked an audience of more than 150 Web developers a hypothetical question: what would an "open" Web app store look like? The answer could play an important role in the future of personal computing.
- Firefox Home: Adults Only
Apple posted the Firefox Home application, which complies with Apple’s policies by using WebKit as opposed to Gecko. Regardless, for whatever reason Apple feels that Firefox Home is a NC-17 application.
- Mozilla Would Like to Pick Your Brain - Revising the MPL
Can we talk about licenses for a bit? It's something I've wanted to talk to you about for a long time, and it's a good time for it, because Mozilla is redrafting its license and would like your input.
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OpenSolaris/Oracle
- A Considered Future For OpenSolaris
You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community observers, we discussed how to respond to the 100% radio silence the OGB has experienced from the new owners of the OpenSolaris copyright and infrastructure. I believe we reached a balanced and well-considered conclusion and remain hopeful of a good outcome.
[...]
There are two choices for the final step. In one, the OGB are able to liaise effectively with empowered Oracle staff to devise a new direction for the OpenSolaris community. The other is one we hope we will not need to take, of recognizing we have no further means available to act and using the formal mechanism defined in the OpenSolaris governance for exactly this situation. Here's hoping.
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WordPress
- Themes are GPL, too
If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preëminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
- The #thesiswp Controversy: WordPress, Themes and the GPL
There are really only two interesting questions here as far as I’m concerned. Does Thesis have the right to not adhere to the terms of the GPL? And independent of that question, does it make business sense for them to not adhere to the license?
- U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
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Semi-Open Source ("Core")
- Some Thoughts on Open
Open Source is at the heart of SugarCRM's business. Well over half of our engineering effort produces code that is released under an OSI approved license. We have three versions of our Sugar CRM product: Community Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL, and has been licensed under some version of the GPL or AGPL since early 2007. Prior to that it was available under several variants of the MPL.
- âÅ On the term “open source business”
I’ve been having a number of conversations in e-mail on the subject of open core business models. The problem that keeps coming up is that there are a range of behaviours exhibited, some of which are acceptable to pragmatists and some of which cross the line into abusing the term “open source”. Where should we draw the line in? When is it acceptable for a company to call itself “an open source business” and when is it not?
[...]
The fact is, the community edition and the commercial editions have disjoint user bases. The community edition is used by a group of people who have the time and skills to deploy by themselves and who have no need of the many differences of the commercial versions. The commercial versions are feature-rich and effectively lock their users into a traditional commercial ISV relationship with the vendor. If these two were kept distinct, there would probably be no pragmatic issue (naturally Free Software purists would still protest the existence of closed code, but that’s not a part of this particular argument).
- Really Open Source Cloud Computing Arrives At Last
I'm still waiting to hear back from Eucalyptus about this, but if it's true it's a significant case study in the consequences of the open core model, both for the company using it, for their customers and for the community they have gathered around the code. Open core obstructed NASA's freedom to modify the code to suit their needs as well as leading to the creation of a powerful competitor for Eucalyptus. I wrote recently that open core is bad for you; this seems a powerful demonstration of that observation in action.
Wine
- Wine Announcement
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is now available.
This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Government
- Creating a FLOSS Roadmap, brick by BRIC
Last year I attended Open World Forum in Paris. It was a lively conference with broad representation of industry leaders, community organizers, and government officials and administrators. The warm reception by the Mayor's office in Paris (at the Hôtel de Ville) underscored what has become increasingly obvious in the analysis of economic statistics: open source software is appreciated, in Paris, France, and Europe. My reflections on the subject of last year's topic, the digital recovery, were captured in the blog posting From Free to Recovery. This year, the agenda of the Open World Forum (Sept 30-Oct 1, 2010) is more ambitious, and I am pleased to be on the program committee, an editor of the 3rd edition of the FLOSS 2020 Roadmap document, as well as one of the organizers of a think-tank session focused on, and beyond, the role of open source software and the future of the BRIC thesis.
- Italian Industrial Association meets Open Source
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
- FR: Defence ministry to test open source office tools
France's ministry of Defence will next year test open source office productivity tools, according to answers given by the ministry to written questions by Bernard Carayon, a member of France's parliament, about a framework contract with a proprietary software vendor.
The ministry on 1 June replied it will in 2011 start testing a software architecture including office tools based on open source software. This will be used parallel to the current proprietary tools. The results of the test will be used to decide on the future IT plans, writes the ministry. "The strategy is to have two or three different solutions available, to avoid vendor dependence, strengthen our bargaining position with suppliers and to have a proven alternative ready."
French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) MP Carayon asked the ministry in Aprilto explain its new framework contract with Microsoft Ireland. Carayon fears that as a consequence of this contract, the ministry will stop all research into alternatives to the proprietary vendor's software.
- Technology Rivals Lobby to Break Microsoft’s Hold
A European plan to advise governments on software purchases has set off a lobbying battle this summer between the U.S. software giant Microsoft and its rivals Google, I.B.M., Red Hat and Oracle over a set of guidelines that could redefine the competitive landscape for proprietary and open-source software.
The focus is a document called the European Interoperability Framework, a recommendation by the European Commission that national, provincial and local governments in the 27-nation European Union will consult when buying software. Open-source software advocates including Google, International Business Machine, Oracle and Red Hat, through a lobbying group, are pushing for a strong endorsement of open-source platforms in the document.
- EC To Provide Government Software Buying Guidelines
The Commission’s European Interoperability Framework guidelines are expected to provide help to national, local and provincial governments on the best software required to upgrade their systems.
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Licensing
- At Least Motorola Admits It
I've written before about the software freedom issues inherent with Android/Linux. Summarized shortly: the software freedom community is fortunate that Google released so much code under Free Software licenses, but since most of the code in the system is Apache-2.0 licensed, we're going to see a lot of proprietarized, non-user-upgradable versions. In fact, there's no Android/Linux system that's fully Free Software yet. (That's why Aaron Williamson and I try to keep the Replicant project going. We've focused on the HTC Dream and the NexusOne, since they are the mobile devices closest to working with only Free Software installed, and because they allow the users to put their own firmware on the device.)
- Western Digital to fix Licensing?
Over the last few months months I've been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement.
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Openness/Sharing
- Seeking a New Round of Amazing Stories
It’s me again, asking you, my dedicated readers (Hi Mom) to help paint this really cool white fence. This is for a presentation my friend and colleague John Ittelson asked me to assist with (I bet more of you know John than me, but ask me sometime to tell the story of the lunch we never had in Albuquerque).
Anyhow, John is doing a session July 28 in San Jose for the Adobe Education Leaders, and he asked about doing a reprise of the Amazing Stories of Openness gig I did last year at the Open Education Conference.
- The BookLiberator.
The BookLiberator is an affordable personal book digitizer. We've just finalized the hardware design and are now proceeding to manufacturing. We want to have them for sale at our online store as soon as possible; we're aiming for a price of appx $120 for the kit plus around $200 for the pair of cameras (many customers will already have consumer-grade digital cameras, so we'll offer the BookLiberator with and without).
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Open Data
- Should the Open Source Initiative adopt the Open Knowledge Definition?
Russ Nelson, License Approval Chair at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), recently proposed a session at OSCON about OSI adopting a definition for open data:
I’m running a BOF at OSCON on Wednesday night July 21st at 7PM, with the declared purpose of adopting an Open Source Definition for Open Data. Safe enough to say that the OSD has been quite successful in laying out a set of criteria for what is, and what is not, Open Source. We should adopt a definition Open Data, even if it means merely endorsing an existing one. Will you join me there?
- Briefing paper on “The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data”
The Semantic Web, open data, linked data. These phrases are becoming increasingly commonly used in terms of web developments and information architectures. But what do they really mean? Are they, can they be, relevant to education?
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Open Access/Content
- The intranet is dead. Long live the intranet.
Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.
- Free Access to the Sum of all Human Tarkovsky
I love this because it really goes beyond just entries in Wikipedia; it's about making everything that *can* be made universally available - non-rivalrous, digital content, in other words - freely accessible for all.
It's one of the key reasons why I think copyright (and patents) need to go: they are predicated on stopping this happening - of *not* sharing what can be shared so easily.
[...]
Update: oh, what a surprise: some of the films have *already* disappeared because of "copyright issues". Because copyright is so much more important than letting everyone enjoy an artist's work. (Via Open Education News.)
- CERN supports Creative Commons
Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.
- Declaration of Open Government
The central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s report was that the Australian Government makes a declaration of open government. As the Minister responsible for that Taskforce, I am proud to make that Declaration today on behalf of the Australian Government.
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Open Hardware
- TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, Again
- The Real Open Source Hardware Revolution
I recently wrote about the latest iteration of the Open Source Hardware Definition, which provides a framework for crafting open hardware licences. It's a necessary and important step on the road towards creating a vibrant open source hardware movement. But the kind of open hardware that is commonly being made today – things like the hugely-popular Arduino - is only the beginning.
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Standards/Consortia
- German Federal CIO sides with Open Standards for public sector
Minister of state Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, IT Commissioner of the German government, said in an interview with the newspaper C't (C't 2010 Heft 15, S. 150-51) that "only by using Open Standards can [the government] obtain independence from software development companies". He also recognised that "maximal interoperability can be reached with open IT-Standards".
For Rogall-Grothe a valid technological standard must first be fully publicized, secondly be unrescritively and consistently used, and thirdly not be subjected to any legal restrictions. "The German government has clearly stated that a technical standard will only be recognised if it can be implemented by all organisations, including Free Software companies and developers", says Matthias Kirschner, German Coordinator at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
- [ODF Plugfest] Brussels - 14 and 15 October 2010
This international plugfest is jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium. The event will be held in Brussels on the 14th and 15th of October 2010. The conference room in the "Boudewijn"-building - kindly provided by the Flemish Government - is conveniently located near the Brussels-North railway station.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- [Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
- So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
- This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
- Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
- 20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
- We are hoping to bring more original stories
- Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
- From over 99% to just over 7%
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- Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
- 4 new stories
- Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
- outrage included
- GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
- Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
- Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
- "Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
- 'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
- looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
- Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
- Links for the day
- Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
- mostly redhat.com
- Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
- Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
- Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
- Seychelles cannot be considered poor
- Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
- "Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
- About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
- The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
- Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
- This is not happening only in Germany
- Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
- It uses buzzwords where none are needed
- [Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
- It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
- Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
- linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
- Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
- retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
- Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
- Not even counting Chromebooks
- LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
- an appeal to recover some of these talks
- Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
- Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
- Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
- "the "smiling faces" behind it."
- Android at 90% or More in Chad
- Windows below 2%
- David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
- "a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
- Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
- And probably at a symbolic capacity only
- Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
- Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
- Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
- uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
- Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
- the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
- Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
- in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
- What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
- Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024
- Links 28/06/2024: Kangaroo Courts and Patents Spam, EFF Still Fighting for CPC's TikTok (a Digital Weapon)
- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
- Links for the day
- [Meme] In 50 Years...
- Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
- Only About 1 in 8 Russian Windows Users is Using Vista 11
- it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
- Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/06/2024: Christmas Prematurely, Self-hosting
- Links for the day
- IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
- almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
- Vista 11 is Doomed and Despite Lack of Adoption Microsoft Already Speaks of Vapourware ("12")
- "Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
- ChromeOS Reaches Highest Share in Years at the World's Most Populous Nation, Windows Now at All-Time Low of 13%
- We're talking about India today
- [Video] "It Is Incredible That Julian Assange Survives"
- There was a positive and mutual relationship between Wikileaks and Dr Jill Stein
- Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
- Who's going to hold them accountable now?
- Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
- I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
- [Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
- predating indefinite detention
- IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
- The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
- "I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
- Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
- State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
- Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
- GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
- Android rising a lot this year, too
- [Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
- Work more; Get less
- Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
- SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
- Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
- Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
- RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock