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{ Monthly Archives } June 2006

Non-freedom comes home to roost for one software developer.

I talked about this before, but now the topic has come back. One of the GStreamer developers apparently didn’t quite see how an MP3 player is non-free for a significant portion of the world.
At the recent FISL (Forum Internationale Software Livre) 2006 conference (a Free Software International conference held in Brazil), Thomas Vander [...]

Switching masters isn’t freedom.

Lie’s criticism is odd and hypocritical—he notices that Microsoft’s “core fonts” are not free software fonts
The fonts are still available for anyone to use, but not to change. It is illegal to add support for more non-Western scripts.

Contrary to what some might read into Lie’s wording here, the Microsoft fonts have never been free to [...]

A response to another blogger’s post.

A response to what’s building on this thread
Free software and commercial software are not opposites. Many business distribute free software as part of business activity, hence commercial software includes free software. Free software doesn’t deny anyone “the freedom to conduct commerce”. Proprietary software (which is what you probably meant to say instead [...]

Stop accepting crappy licensing.

Red Hat, distributors of a popular GNU/Linux system, recently held a summit in Nashville. They recorded the talks and are releasing copies of them online. But you’re prohibited from distributing copies of the talks to your friends, even non-commercially and verbatim without hassle.
Three Fedora Core GNU/Linux fans (Bob Lord, Christopher Blizzard, and Mark [...]