Cette année, une petite nouvelle est arrivée dans le monde des licences de logiciel libre : la seconde version de la licence publique Mozilla (MPL 2.0). Elle n’est pas totalement nouvelle, car elle garde l’esprit général de la première version puisqu’il s’agit d’une licence de faible copyleft. C’est-à-dire que cette licence permet dans une certaine mesure — assez large — de combiner du code régi par la MPL avec du code sous une autre licence (y compris propriétaire). Pour autant, des modifications apportées aux fichiers du code MPL doivent être régies par les mêmes obligations : mise à disposition du code source, notifications des droits des utilisateurs (droits d’utiliser, de partager, d’étudier le fonctionnement et de publier des modifications — la définition d’un logiciel libre).
Ainsi, la MPL est un bon compromis, entre d’un côté les licences “académiques” (BSD, MIT) et de l’autre, les licences copyleft¹ fortes comme la licence publique générale GNU. Mais comme tout compromis, la MPL souffre des inconvénients incombant à chacun des deux modèles de licence.
Il y a cependant des qualités indéniables à la MPL 2.0, que j’ai voulues résumer ici […]
Lire Les qualités de la MPL 2.0.
Coming at the CCC, I thought I should take some extra caution. One of the things I did was to add a lock-screen password on Android 4.0 (that I updated from manually about a week ago). Yesterday morning, I figured this was mostly annoying. So I decided to remove it and I kept the simple “slide” lock icon.
Then this night, around 3 or 4 a.m. I wanted to check my emails at the #28C3 party, there was a sheet of paper with the name of a wifi network and a password. I thought, well, that’s great. How stupid I was.
I connected to this network and did some emails for about 20 minutes. As the night goes on, the phone went out of battery. When I got home and plugged the phone to restart it something unexpected happened. The phone was displaying the lock screen, asking for a password; not the SIM code.
I don’t have the password. The former password I use doesn’t work. And there aren’t any options available to me to fix it (apparently, former versions used to suggest to reset the password with an email to the Google account). I am not root on this phone, it’s not in debug mode, etc.
Basically, I got locked out of my own phone. It looks like I just got owned.
Bug report: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=23697
and save as /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml for instance on Debian Wheezy. Now, refresh Gnome Shell (by doing alt+f2, ‘r’) and whenever you search for someting in the Shell’s Activity overview, you have the possibility to search the Web with DuckDuckGo.
The ACTA has thrown a lot of nonsense at us, citizens, for the last four years now. Not only the policies the agreement wants to impose are absurd from economic, social and cultural standpoints (if you’re aiming at any kind of progress or well-being); but also the whole process that we’ve been trying to deal with is made of such non-sense that it’s hard to make the citizens’ voice heard (and even less to make the citizen’s voice count — you know: free speech and democracy).
Lately, the European Parliament legal service has refused to provide a public analysis on ACTA, although it was aksed to do so by the European Parliament (people we elected to represent us at the EU level). The reason?
“Important trading partners of the EU, such as the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and Switzerland are contracting parties to the ACTA agreement. Disclosure of the parts of the legal opinion under consideration dealing with questions 1, 2 and 3 would seriously interfere with the complex ratification procedures of the ACTA agreement and the EU’s relations with the other contracting parties, as it might prejudice the ratification procedures by these countries.”
The legal service won’t publish their analysis because it might influence the ratification process of other parties to the agreement; that means other than the EU.
So the EU Parliament will vote on ratification on a treaty without public analysis, because such an analysis would have influenced the US. Brilliant, if not sad.
For a quick analysis on how ACTA endangers Free Software growth, please read ACTA: threats to Free Software. Your comments on that are strongly welcome.
