A Quebec court ruled a provincial agency was wrong to install Microsoft software on its computers without allowing others, such as Linux dealers, to bid on the lucrative contract, AFP learned Friday.
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Firefox With H.264 HTML 5 Support = Wild Fox
http://slashdot.org –
Only two countries in the world have software patents which make it impossible to freely use video codecs such as AVC (H.264). [The Wild Fox project] aims to release Firefox builds with the features previously excluded due to software patents. This software will be available to those in non-software patent encumbered countries.
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Websites fade to black in censorship protest
http://www.smh.com.au –
Hundreds of websites joined an Australia Day "internet blackout" today to protest against the Government's web censorship agenda
Read more »Is Android really open? Really?
http://openattitude.com –
I’m not Android-bashing here by any means. I regularly use Google Wave and have a Gmail account. But I’m hesitant to turn over all of my personal data — specifically my address book and appointments — to Google.
Why? I'll tell you why...
FSF files new objection to amended Google Book Search settlement
http://www.fsf.org –
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed another objection in court to the proposed amended Google Book Search settlement (The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.). The objection notes that proposed amendments which discuss works under free licenses unfairly burden their authors with ensuring license compliance, and urges the court to reject the proposed settlement.
Read more »Adding up the explanations for ACTA's "shameful secret"
http://arstechnica.com –
Why is an intellectual property treaty being negotiated in the name of the US public kept quiet as a matter of national security and treated as "some shameful secret"?
Read more »Microsoft not feeling TomTom Linux patent chill?
http://blog.internetnews.com –
I asked Sam Ramji senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft about TomTom the other day and he claimed that patent issues aren't causing any chilling effect on his part of Microsoft's open source plans.
Read more »Microsoft Calls for Open Cloud Standards
http://www.eweek.com –
Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of developer platform management, discusses Microsoft's call for an open process to define cloud computing going forward. Essentially, Martin expressed concern about a so-called "Cloud Manifesto" and Microsoft's view that it is biased to benefit its authors.
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Taking a Closer Look at Microsoft's Ms-PL Open Source License
http://www.cmswire.com –
The rumors are true. Microsoft (news, site) has an official open source license that was approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — the Ms-PL, or Microsoft Public License. Since they have licensed their latest offering ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under the Ms-PL, we thought we would take a look at the license terms. Is there an evil catch somewhere in the terms and conditions?
Read more »Is Your Support of Copyleft Logically Consistent?
http://ebb.org –
[...] However, it's ultimately hypocritical to claim support for a copyleft structure but oppose GPL enforcement. If you believe the license should have a legal requirement that ensures software is always distributed in software freedom, then why would you be surprised — or, even worse, angry — that a copyright holder would seek to uphold users' rights when that license is violated?
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SCO vs. Linux: SCO gets Chapter 11 trustee
http://www.h-online.com –
A Chapter 11 trustee has been commissioned to take over the business affairs of the SCO Group, which is threatened by bankruptcy. The trustee will work to guide the company out of the impending bankruptcy according to Chapter 11 of US bankruptcy code, but can also send the company into liquidation according to Chapter 7 and auction individual company assets to the highest bidder.
Read more »EU Commission Opens In Depth Investigation of Sun-Oracle Deal
http://www.groklaw.net –
The EU Commission has just released a press release. They are not going to approve the Oracle takeover of Sun just yet anyway. Instead they are launching an in depth investigation of the deal, and it's MySQL that seems to be the issue. Here's the press release. This doesn't mean it won't happen, and the deadline for a final result of the investigation is January 19, 2010.
Read more »EU Commission Invites Comments on the Microsoft Deal - Here's Where to Send Them
http://www.groklaw.net –
The official notice of the new draft deal between Microsoft and the EU Commission has now been posted to the EC website and published [PDF] in the Official Journal of the European Union, and it invites comments, giving all the addresses, email, fax and regular mail, where interested parties can submit their observations within a month of the date of the announcement.
Read more »Open Core Is Bad For You
http://www.computerworlduk.com –
Apologists for the lock-in-prone "open core" model try to wrap themselves in the open source flag. Your business could suffer.
Read more »ACTA is No Done Deal!
http://www.laquadrature.net –
It will leave the MEPs and members of National Parliaments with a historical choice: blessing this circumvention of democracy or affirming that law is produced by elected representatives", declares Philippe Aigrain, founder of La Quadrature du Net.
Read more »Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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