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{ Monthly Archives } November 2007

Proprietors not as friendly to infringers as Free Software copyright holders

Illuminata Analyst Gordon Haff is quoted as saying
If people get the impression that even inadvertent license violations will get them involved with lawyers, you could well see some making the call that it’s safer to stay away from open source
The GNU GPL is not an “open source” license except that the Open Source Initiative organization [...]

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

Buy Nothing Day encourages you to buy nothing today—”Participate by not participating”.
When AdBusters tried to advertise Buy Nothing Day on television, MTV rejected their ad.
MTV, the channel that markets itself to hip youth, has decreed that our Buy Nothing Day public service spot “goes further than we are willing to accept on our channels”. Gangsta [...]

Why isn’t Stephen Colbert on the SC ballot?

According to CNN, Sen. Barack Obama didn’t want him on the ballot.
The Democrats are being shown up by Colbert’s short-lived presidential candidacy. A recent Colbert Report episode features recent corporate news coverage of his campaign and one of the clips shows Colbert polling ahead of a few Democrats. I doubt the Democrats like [...]

Planting social solidarity reaps a harvest of community

Free software hacker Jamie McCracken wrote that the One Laptop Per Child machine, known as the XO, shouldn’t allow its users to run non-free operating systems on it. I believe this stems from the common frustration that proprietors are wealthy enough to effectively undo some of the good that comes with a machine like [...]