While introducing free software fonts to my colleagues and students at my work, I review the license for the fonts I bundle on the systems I build. Some LaTeX fonts are particularly pretty and useful, so I read the LaTeX Project Public License and the commentary on Wikipedia about this license. This license covers a [...]
Richard Matthew Stallman, founder of the free software movement recently gave a talk entitled “Copyright vs. Community” at Balamand University, in north Lebanon. He has given this talk many times before and there are recordings of previous talks available online (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I wasn’t at the Balamand University talk, but I’ve heard [...]
“Planning for Disaster” helps put President Obama’s priorities in context. I don’t mind that Obama would visit a solar panel plant instead of going to a funeral for the Horizon rig victims, but I do mind that Obama is doing fundraising work and a sports interview. The Daily Show highlighted how many athletes he met [...]
Engadget reports that Apple Computer chief Steve Jobs recently spoke about DRM (digital restrictions management): Q: I bought the movie Up on DVD, it had a digital download. I put it on my iPad. I hooked up my VGA adapter and tried to play it… but I couldn’t because of HDCP. Can you tell me [...]
Apple is currently distributing an electronic version of the centuries-old board game “Go” called GNU Go. GNU Go’s copyright holder is the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and part of the GNU operating system. GNU Go is licensed to everyone under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Apple imposes numerous restrictions on program [...]
The Blender Foundation, primary hackers of Blender, a free software non-linear video editor and 3D renderer, have been working on a new short movie called “Sintel”. You should get a free software web browser that can handle playing movies in free codecs. I suggest GNU Icecat or Firefox. Visit their blog for more details (including [...]
You should get a free software web browser that can handle playing movies in free codecs. I suggest GNU Icecat or Firefox. Patent Absurdity explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy. The film [...]
As if you didn’t already have enough reasons to avoid doing business with Apple, here’s one more—read The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (versions 20100127 and 20100302). The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the secretive license agreement [...]
Prof. Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Center, gives another must-not-miss talk on software freedom with hosted services (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other third-party services run on behalf of their users), colloquially known as “the cloud” (a purposefully vague reference to hosting services somewhere else, a virtual place that contains your data). What [...]
Introduction BitTorrent is the most popular filesharing protocol on the Internet today. BitTorrent users typically obtain pieces of the data they want and share pieces of the same data with others. By cooperating in this fashion, almost everyone who wants a copy of the data gets what they want. There are many programs one can [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley