Occasionally I come across articles about Google that say they can’t understand Google’s business plan. Google’s business plan seems obvious to me and has for some time now—collect and index data about a large number of people and then deliver interesting summaries of that information to their paying clients. They’ll acquire the information by providing [...]
Here’s a nice book for you to share with children: The Pig and the Box. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license so you can share it non-commercially as much as you like. You can even build on it, remix it, translate it, and make new stuff based on it so long as [...]
Someone who apparently works for Novell (a distributor of a GNU/Linux system) named “dobey” asks I continue to see people blog about how site foo doesn’t use open source software to play videos, or how company bar won’t release some piece of code as open source. And the big argument here is always how it [...]
The BBC reports that despite Apple’s alleged zero tolerance policy for any instance, isolated or not, of any treatment of workers that could be interpreted as harsh, Apple has been found to support workers: working more than six consecutive days 25% of the time, working more than 60 hours a week a third of the [...]
Ars Technica reports on a developing case where Macrovision, developers of a well-known video anti-copying technique preventing easy duplication of DVDs and videotapes, sued Sima, developer of a well-known anti-Macrovision device one can plug in between a DVD player and a VCR (or two VCRs) to make copies. If Sima loses, what rights do you [...]
Apple recently announced that they are redesigning and redeploying the mainboard for their latest notebook computer, the MacBook Pro. It’s worth putting this in some context so you can see how sad the situation really is for Apple users here. Apple’s hardware is a collection of cherry-picked parts. Apple decides what hardware they want to [...]
Recently some work was done with the GNOME logo and it was clear that the GNOME logo artists had chosen a non-free font—Trebuchet MS—for the text. The same critique applies to all of what were once known as the Microsoft “Core Fonts”. Microsoft no longer distributes these fonts but others have distributed copies under their [...]
Intel releases source code to drive its upcoming video hardware under the MIT license (a non-copylefted free software license). Here’s a list of the hardware you can use with this software (these are the video cards to choose from when buying your next video card, laptop, or desktop machine): Short name Full name 965G G965 [...]
Mark Shuttleworth, owner of Canonical (which publishes the popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux system), recently gave an interview to More4 News in which Shuttleworth is said to be a “rival” to Microsoft. The interview is available exclusively in Windows Media. In order to see the interview on Ubuntu GNU/Linux one must run an i386-compatible build of Ubuntu [...]
For years I’ve hosted Digital Citizen on WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, Illinois, first during overnight programming and then during primetime. I’m leaving WEFT and hosting my final episode of Digital Citizen there tonight. Bad managerial decisions have compelled me to leave the station. It’s been my privilege to bring you news about what’s going [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley Richard Stallman