Phil Zimmermann, initial programmer of “PGP”—Pretty Good Privacy—brought strong encryption to the masses. For three years ending in 1996, Zimmermann was under criminal investigation for violating export restrictions on strong encryption due to his work on PGP. Furthermore, PGP was not free software for everyone, only for those in non-profit organizations. Eventually GPG—the GNU Privacy [...]
Eben Moglen’s talk at the 2006 Free Software Foundation Associate Membership meeting (play it now!) stole the show. I am glad I was there. I am glad there’s a high-quality recording available (of all of the talks) in a free format under a license that allows redistribution in any form so long as a simple [...]
Cockburn, Nader, and Frank hitting the nail on the head. Again. A movie to see: “Why We Fight“. If you enjoy informative documentaries, you’ll like “Why We Fight”. I paid to see both in a local small theater, and I hope a portion of my ticket price went to the filmmakers. They earned it.
Molly Ivins’ latest essay on what’s wrong with the DLC Democrats is right on, strongly-worded, strident, and she names names (and I don’t say any of that to connote something bad, I wish more people would say what they mean in clear unadulterated language free of business-friendly doublespeak). But only time will tell if she [...]
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and their friends (undoubtedly including the big book publishers and their representative associations), have found a new way to push the argument of copy control too far. Freedom to Tinker has the story and its well worth reading. [...]
This blog post asks an interesting question: We in the Free and Open Source software community spend a great deal of time talking about free codecs and supporting those codecs, at least in words. So why on Planet Gnome do I see three different examples of people demoing cool new things with non-free codecs/tools? I [...]
I read that in an upcoming version of Firefox, the increasingly popular free software web browser, there will be an “Exit Survey”. Ben Goodger, a Firefox developer, writes in his blog: We’d like to know why people leave Firefox. A survey on uninstall would help us find ways to make the software better in future [...]
For those of you who don’t know: MP3 is patent-encumbered. The algorithms used to make or play MP3s are patented and (in some countries, like the US) must be licensed before they can be used legally (glossing over some details here in the interest of brevity). The license structure is incompatible with free software. Fluendo, [...]
I was browsing my public library in late October and I jotted down something I forgot to bring up here. I read this on page 23 of the October 28, 2005 Chicago Reader in a full-page ad: There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our [...]
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