GNU shall not pass! *Thanks to Simon Phipps for coining “fake GNUs“, which I’m totally stealing. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community has been shaken by a minor yet interesting incident that has opened a discussion on politics and governance. Lerna is a popular open source tool for Read more…
Amongst one of the most archaic legal arguments one can engage in, the question of whether free software licences are contracts or mere licences is up there with similar arcane questions about monkeys having rights. Thankfully I seem to be a specialist in those exact types of questions. A few Read more…
When Microsoft stated last year that they loved open source, the first thought that crossed my mind was that Free and Open Source Software had won the war, and that the rest would simply be a race to determine who would be left to carry the torch into the proprietary Read more…
I was not going to mention the sad early departure of Steve Jobs, the media and the blogosphere are already saturated with coverage of his death. Of all the words uttered in the last few days, I think that xkcd’s tribute (pictured) is the most adequate. The coverage has been Read more…
Google has just lost a patent infringement suit in Texas (where else?) which could have nefarious consequences for open source development in the United States. A Texas jury has awarded Bedrock Computer Technologies $5 million USD when it found that the search engine giant had infringed one of its software Read more…
I’ve been looking with great interest OpenKinect, an open source project that in its own words is an “open community of people interested in making use of the amazing Xbox Kinect hardware with our PCs and other devices. We are working on free, open source libraries that will enable the Read more…
I loved this version of the BSD open source licence in rhyme so much that I thought I would have to reproduce it here. NOTE: The author does not like the poem to be reproduced anywhere other than in his page (the poem is ironically posted with All Rights Reserved). Read more…
Last Wednesday I attended Professor Eben Moglen’s lecture in Edinburgh, he is presenting here for the second time in two years. Here are some notes. (Full lecture here). Defining the problem: Software is everywhere, it’s in cars, hospitals, in buildings, and in all other sort of devices. “There is software Read more…
As mentioned in earlier posts, Yours Truly presented at a conference in Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. The conference was attended by African IP officials, and dealt mostly with software protection topics such as software patents, open source software and standards. However, I was surprised to find that one Read more…
This is a great video about what makes people perform better and be more creative: One of the questions asked over and over again about open business models is precisely what makes open source work. How can Wikipedia exist? Who programs open source software? There is growing empirical evidence that Read more…