Datamation’s James Maguire just published an article with an audience questions session and an interview of Richard Stallman. I think it’s quite interesting. There’s also a page 2 and a page 3. On that kind of topic, Palamida‘s GPLv3 blog reports the number of GPLv3 projects has reached 2,000. I’ll have to look into this Read more »
It’s now one month since the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting. There were complaints about the procedure, and these were refuted by the Convener Alex Brown, but I think it’s more important to focus on the substance. By Rob Weir’s count, only about 1.5% of problems were fixed at the Geneva meeting. India subbmitted it’s "disapprove" Read more »
A lot of media reports seem to have missed that Microsoft have said very explicitly that they consider patent licences mandatory for anyone who wants to use the interop info they’re going to publish. This makes it pretty much unusable by free software, so this PR stunt is no more than that. Below is a Read more »
Because Apple encrypted the pre-installed firmware, the Rockbox and iPod Linux projects have been unable to port their after-market firmware to the iPod nano 2nd generation or 3rd generation. I’m a very happy user of Rockbox on my iRiver H10, so after receiving an iPod as a gift, I was very disappointed that I couldn’t Read more »
Bruce Perens’ 10 year look back at the "Open Source" marketing campaign reminded me of another anniversary coming up. On September 27th, it’ll be the 25-year anniversary of the GNU project’s announcement, and thus, of the free software movement. That’s a biggie. What to do? Maybe something should be done to record the history of Read more »
Although quiet, the consultation for drafting the next version of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, plus the new GNU Simpler Free Documentation License, are still ongoing: http://gplv3.fsf.org/doclic-dd1-guide.html The online draft of GFDLv2 still has Invariant Sections. The proposed GSFDL is a documentation licence without Invariant Sections. I don’t have information about the timeline for the Read more »
Sean Daly has just posted an interview about the BBC’s iPlayer DRM scandal: Groklaw: Interview with Mark Taylor, by Sean Daly The iPlayer is a piece of proprietary software developed by the BBC which only runs on Microsoft operating systems, thus excluding GNU/Linux users from watching this publicly-funded channel. Not only that, but it seems Read more »
Some links about today’s announcment by the European Commission that an agreement has been reached with Microsoft about the anti-trust case. Groklaw story with transcript by Sean Daly of the post announcement press Q&A The European Commission’s press statement, read out by Neelie Kroes A supplementary FAQ from the EC An NY Times article, quoting Read more »
When Monday’s anti-trust verdict was announced, the FSFE and Samba team talked to the gathered journalists and then sat down for a group interview with Sean Daly. That interview is on Groklaw now, and I think it came out very well. There’s Carlo Piana and Georg Greve for FSFE and Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke Read more »
FSFE’s official response to this morning’s ECJ’s ruling is now online: “Microsoft can consider itself above the law no longer,” says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). “Through tactics that successfully derailed antitrust processes in other parts of the world, including the United States, Microsoft has managed to postpone this day Read more »