Tristan Rhodes describes the pitch and allure of the open source movement perfectly and simultaneously (perhaps inadvertently) describes why that pitch has so little allure to those who frame the issue in terms of price: What is the main benefit of open source? The short answer is that open source reduces the cost of software. [...]
She likes the largest multinational corporations and disfavors the smaller ones. Cory Doctorow on Marybeth Peters is illuminating: Marybeth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, has come out in favor of the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying “it did what it was supposed to do.” The DMCA makes it possible to sue companies [...]
Democracy Now! made a typical error when describing the latest Microsoft antitrust violation fine. Here’s how DN! put it on today’s show: In business news, Microsoft has lost an anti-trust appeal before Europe”s second highest court and has been ordered to pay a record $690 million fine for abusing its dominance in computer operator systems. [...]
The latest change to iPod software that rendered the audio listening device less interoperable has been broken. This isn’t the first time iPod and iTunes-related algorithms were broken and it won’t be the last. Read more about the news or download a local copy of the public domain source code that implements the new hashing [...]
Background Apple has changed the way iPods work so that only Apple’s software can successfully manipulate the songs on an iPod. Until the new arrangement is reverse-engineered, Apple has locked in iPod users into their software, transforming a more useful general-purpose audio listening and file carrying device to something that chiefly obeys Apple’s wishes. Lennart [...]
Today is Software Freedom Day, a day when we celebrate the freedom of free software for its own sake, relishing in the community we’ve built around sharing and treating each other as partners. Free software is software that respects the user’s freedom to run, share, inspect, and modify the program for any purpose at any [...]
More and more people recognize that the Democrats are no opposition party. It’s outrageous. One word, it’s outrageous. And I rarely use that word, because it’s such [hyperbole]. And the Democrats didn’t join, the Democrats led, because — let’s be very clear. The House leader and the Senate leader, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid, could [...]
Background When you install or first run a Microsoft operating system, the computer wants to communicate with a server at Microsoft to learn if it is a legally obtained copy or not. If the OS isn’t deemed legal by Microsoft’s server, or if there’s no response from Microsoft’s server, the OS will run with what [...]
Champaign County Illinois, USA uses a pair of ES&S machines to prepare and count (plus physically store) the ballots. Use of the ballot preparation machine is optional—one can fill in the bubbles manually with a pen or pencil. This first machine can also (at the voter’s option) scan a completed ballot and report to the [...]
Save some room for Apple, whose behavior would be as objectionable as Microsoft if Apple had the clout Microsoft does. Apple distributes proprietary software, thus denying its users software freedom. Apple’s proprietary word processor doesn’t support OpenDocument (ODF), a file format for electronic office documents which is fully published and available for any developer to [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley