After about seven month of discussion and more than 1000 comments through gplv3.fsf.org/comments/ the FSF has published the second draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3 and the first draft of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3 which is now designed as a set of permissive exceptions to GPLv3 Read more »
DefectiveByDesign, a FSF campaign to eliminate DRM, has written an open letter to Bono the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 to take a stand against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The group has focused on Bono because of his social activism and leadership in the music industry. The aim is to collect 10.000 Read more »
As a GNU/Linux user i’m used to have PDF export in almost every program. With Office 2007 Microsoft finally wants to offer this common feature to their users too. But it seems like Adobe doesn’t like this idea. As cnet reported Adobe asked Microsoft to remove the PDF export feature or pay a fee for Read more »
Great news! Google has finally enabled server-to-server on their Jabber network. That means Google Talk is no longer an instant-messaging-island but has become a part of the “jabber family”. With many people using Gmail and get to know Google-Talk it’s a great chance that the free instant messaging protocol will get some publicity and hopefully Read more »
The institute of computer science at the University of Zurich has developed a new software (TeNDaX) which allows more than 300 people to work on one text-document simultaneously. As you can read here (German) the university will file a patent application. I’m surprised, does software patents already exists in switzerland? Beside the problem of software Read more »
Inspired by Georgs Ideas for Fellowship Web Buttons and his “Fellow Me: Say NO! to Vienna Manipulations” banner i have created a few banners based on the “Vienna Manipulations”-banner. Here is my collection of Fellowship Banners. I don’t know why, but the portal always resize the images. To get the original size download the XCF Read more »
After 2005 was the year of Albert Einstein (“Einsteinjahr”) 2006 will be the year of computer science (“Jahr der Informatik”). Prof. Joachim Treusch chairman of the initiative “Wissenschaft im Dialog (WiD)” said that their are two major topics: the technical effects and the social effects of information technology. I think there will be many events, Read more »
Seems like the parliament and the government of France have a contrary position about intellectual monopoly rights. While the government want to introduce an implementation of the EUCD which could even ban Free Software. The French Parliament has voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet. Heise has published Read more »
Merry Christmas to everyone! I have a small christmas story for you (unfortunately only in german): http://www.rofrisch.de/poesie/wmann.htm Hope it doesn’t destroy someones believe in Santa Claus. 😉
robertschuster has already wrote about Greg Kroah-Hartman fun patch which would mark all PCI functions as only able to be used by GPL licensed kernel code. Today Arjan van de Ven sent a mail with the subject “Linux in a binary world” to the linux kernel mailinglist (LKML). He described a scenario how non-free drivers Read more »