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A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects: All software is subject to copyright law. The moment you save code to a file, copyright law gives you certain rights to control what other people can do with your work. Because almost everybody who contributes code to a software project has rights with respect to their code, understanding the basics of copyright is essential to running a FOSS project.

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

From the creators of PocketPCFreeware.mobi, this new site specializes in free software for the non-touch screen "Standard" version of Windows Mobile formerly called Windows Smartphone. Currently SmartphoneFreeware only has about 500 files for download compared with 6000 for on the Pocket PC site and 9000 on Palm freeware site.

Although I had thought myself an active member and fervent evangelist of this community I obviously was not. This became clear when the OSI board clearly coached Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, on what and how to submit when he resubmitted his badgeware license, renamed CPAL. The board then approved, in a private session at OSCON this license against the wishes of the community at large. A license that is not even compatible with the most widely used free software licenses: GPL and LGPL. Also disturbing to me is the fact that Socialtext had, for as much as, four years claimed to be an open source company, but never released a single line of source code for the software they were distributing for a fee.

. . . there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.

I’m using Outlook Express to send and receive my email during office hours and it is necessary for me to backup the important emails periodically. I have spent a lot of time to search the free software to backup the email from Outlook Express, at last I found this software is only allowed 30 days trials, it is not very useful because I can’t backup my email after one month because this software will be expired and even you reinstall also cannot use at all.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe and Open Rights Group launched a call for action because next week the European Parliament will vote IPRED2, the EU’s second intellectual property enforcement directive.

Check out getjar.com. You’ll find a list of free software arranged by title, device and platform. There’s e-crypt, pocket wallet, pocket oxford english dictionary and the oh so popular PalmaSutra.

NASA is looking for volunteers to write code. In an attempt to start an open source collaboration with software developers, NASA has started CosmosCode:

Sahana , an Open Source Disaster Management system that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, has won the 2006 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit awarded by the Free Software Foundation.

This blogger details out a simple way to use Xen for webmaster's using VPS. You can start up your own ISP that way!

Benjamin, started thinking about the issue almost two years ago, explaining that unlike Free Software, Creative Commons in his opinion failed to set any standard of freedom. Then he argued that:

As if that wasn’t enough new developments, there are more. Gregory Brown will give a presentation at the Boston Ruby Group on February 13. The presentation will consist of a short introduction to Ruport and a demonstration of a camping application running on top of Ruport. On the heels of that talk, Gregory will be attending the Mountain West Ruby Conference on March 16-17. While there, he will give a talk about the “tools, techniques, and practices necessary to build a successful free software project.” Gregory will refer to his experiences with Ruport and will therefore be able to give pragmatic advice on getting through choke points during a project’s growth.

The always remarkable Free Software Foundation have released a new campaign/site: http://badvista.fsf.org/

Cisco offers a free version of TACACS+ that you can download. However, please note that it is not a fully supported version. In fact, Cisco seldom updates the free TACACS+ daemon and it lacks several of the advanced features of commercially available TACACS+ software. Furthermore, Cisco warns that this free software comes with no warranty or support.

If you are using windows operating system, Infra Recorder is a good free software to burn the ISO into a CD. Just insert a bland CD and select actions>Burn Image from the menu.

OpenPBX is a free software PBX now running on several platforms.

She’s right. My only quibble is that what we’re doing isn’t just making any old basic software. We’re unique in that we create tools, and those tools are by and for the sector we work in. When a tool doesn’t exist, and we see a need - an itch that can be scratched, to use the old Free Software term - we create the tool to address the need.

I think that given what the free open source community has achieved especially in the short term, project wise, it is plain to see one does not need to invest $100 million dollars to develop a course management system. For Blackboard to break even on their costs and make a profit, I would suspect that Blackboard’s CMS features a rather large price tag (note you don’t actually own what you paid for, you get a license to use it under their terms and restrictions). I personally thus do not support Blackboard on this matter because it’s interest in developing a patent portfolio (funny name; seem to be the next new thing…?) conflicts especially with free software projects that aim to make the world a better place by providing quality education tools and not make supernormal profits.

Ameritrade’s Becker said the company advises clients to make sure they have good spyware detection software on their computers. Ameritrade’s Web site also offers clients free software that helps detect or eliminate snooping programs.

This free software isn’t just an uninstaller utility but also a clicktrail and Registry cleaner, secure file file eraser and basic system privacy tool.

Ubuntu is open source and free. It comes with loads of free software, including OpenOffice which users have told me will do most anything Microsoft Office can do. It too is free.

Using a proxy software in our computer. There are almost 100 Free software proxies in http://www.download.com. Among them ‘Proxy+ 3.0′ is most popular among the users. There are two types of Proxies HTTP proxy and the CGI proxy. I think the HTTP proxies are faster than the CGI ones.

If that's the case, perhaps Richard Stallman should rewrite the GPL so that it doesn't (rather effectively) hinder small, grass-roots, free software development and distribution projects. Perhaps he ought to use his influence to stop the Free Software Foundation from using the clauses already in the GPL as an excuse to bully small free software development and distribution projects with its legal heft. MEPIS wasn't the only distribution targeted: also take note of the threat of legal action looming over other projects such as Kororaa Xgl LiveCD. John Andrews of Damn Small Linux reportedly agrees with the estimation of MEPIS' founder Warren Woodford that a great many small Linux distribution projects are at significant risk, and new projects are considerably less likely to spring up in the evolving legal climate of the "free" software community.

Seems like the developers of WordPresss made such a solid product that they are finally getting paid for it, good for them. The price seems relatively reasonable for an enterprise level blogging solution, to boot. I am wondering how they understand the term “customizable”? I will assume that virtually all of the corporations interested in the Automattic support service will want a Multi-User platform. Yet, WPMU for the open source community is still in the nightly stages, and from my last go-round with it two months ago it was no fun to play with at all - is the Automattic support service rolling out a packaged version of this? -as well as top notch support?

I’ve been following with interest the Mark Pilgrim Apple->Free Software Switch. Time for more bullet points!

Here (.mp3 25Mb, .ogg 21Mb) is an interesting talk with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and funder of the Ubuntu project. It provides some interesting insights into the direction of the project and Shuttleworth’s vision for free software in general. He make it quite clear the Ubuntu with Gnome, and Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE) are equal citizens and will be promoted, developed and funded as a such. My person favorite moment is when the German interviewer almost spits on the ground while asking why Gnome is the default desktop instead of KDE.

Summer’s almost over, and this summer I’m going to build a computer, so I’m not restricted to my shared computer. I’m thinking of converting to Linux 100%, but I don’t know if I can or if I’ll just install it Dual-Boot. I can navigate linux pretty good (without GUI :P) since I’ve been messing with shell accounts and things. Not to mention my favor of irssi. My bud claims he can play Counter-Strike: Source using WINE. So I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving that behind, I’m not sure if I can WINE XFire, Trillian, etc… but then again there is gAIM (Not that I favor gAIM) but yeah. I’m not sure if I’ll go all the way, I’ve already converted from mIRC -> irssi (Yep, except DCC cause I don’t exactly have unlimited bandwitdth on the shell im irssing off.) So I’m not sure what to do. I’d like to take the plunge and become a full linux user. Anywhos. Everything’s going well on this end. Talk to you all later, maybe I’ll post about Perl, or Bittorrent or something technical.

With a bit of Internet Searching, I stumbled across one of the best bits of free software I think I have ever found, JAlbum (currently version 6.4). There's loads of skins available, simple to use and customise (assuming you understand the basics of editing HTT's) and does everything on my list apart from the last one.

Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is program that gives “student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period.” It’s the 2nd year for the program, which last year had 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations in 49 countries.

It is sad to hear that one of the pioneers in search-engine technology passed away young at the age of only 42. Paul Flaherty was one of the driving forces and masterbrains behind (originally) Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s AltaVista, which was one of the first real search engines. I personally liked and used it alot back then and because AV helped me numerous times and saved me countless hours, I really do want to express my compassion and condolences for his friends and family.

Shared Source, is an umbrella term used by Microsoft for its dabbling in the open-source wave. It encompasses multiple programs that grant licensees to access the source codes from ASP.NET sample kit all the way up to the Windows itself. The license under which SSCLI is distributed does not exactly make it free software as the license fails to satisfy the four freedoms of an free software license. However, there is enough discussion on this topic and certainly nobody can argue that having access to the source code of the CLI is worse than not.

This was found in a comment on Eric's post on open source and IDE's which refelected on Delphi for sale. There is an online petition asking Mark ShuttleWorth to buy Delphi and release it as free software. Nice. But.......

Oops, make that 4, I forgot this one: Fixing Patents, Open-Source Style - Free Software devotees decry any and all software patents and the proprietary world can’t get enough of them. This editorial by an ex-VP of Red Hat seems to be a call for compromise. Yes, another ugly word.

Packgoogle.com probably refers to their regrettable free software pack that’s already been released.

Basically, there’s no ‘easy’, trivial, or even takes-a-couple-of-hours way to make most GNU configure built software create a universal binary under a PPC host at the moment; however, this universal build structure is entirely native on the x86 development systems, and the new x86 variants. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a couple grand to throw at free software that costs me money to offer every month.

Pero ya hay una primera minuta de la *GPLv3 (con exposición de motivos) que ataca asuntos *techie *atualíssimos y, en el mejor estilo de la tradición del *free software, está de ojo en el *establishment , especialmente el americano. Busca revertir la tendencia de *cercear los derechos de los usuarios de software de todas las maneras en nombre de la seguridad y de los logro$.

One of my Office mates send me this link. This is a Free Software (IISPassword) which could be used to password protect your web site content, without the hassle of system user Accounts. It is Integrated with IIS and is Compatible with Apache.

While looking up links for another post, I came across this site about Linux Software RAID. The guy has a banner ad at the top of his page for GnuCash and as much as I dislike advertising, maybe it’s a really good idea for breaking into the brand-aware consciousness of non-Open Source and Free Software people. I think if people saw what they were missing, they might do something about getting it.

So, Java embedding sounds sort of obscure doesn’t it? But what it means is that lots of free software I depend on for my workflow won’t work. Firefox won’t work unless you can give up Java and Flash. 3 months ETA on that. NeoOffice/J, the OpenOffice platform for Mac won’t work either, and there’s no ETA on that.

Ok so I did it! I am now running Linux on my laptop and everything seems to be going well. I even got it to play nice with my Microsoft wireless adapter which was the big hang up for me in the past. If you are curious I am currnetly running Ubuntu Linux (Based on Debian). I will provide updates from time to time to let you know how things are going with it. I am writting this on my linux laptop at the moment in fact. Go free software!

Organized by a commited team, it aims to become a significant event for free software in the Rhineland. The conference is hosted by the faculty of Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.

In the "Open Source for Newbies" department we have yet another author taking a run at explaining the difference between "free" and "freedom." This author (David Chisnall at informit.com) does a pretty good job, as he goes to some effort to explain the 4 freedoms outlined by the Free Software Movement and how the concept of free -- as in "no cost" -- got grafted on to Open Source. Good reading if this is still a topic that causes you some consternation.

Gaim 2.0 should be out next Friday, which is very good news for us alternative os folk and free software windows people. There are a lot of new features planned, and personally I prefer gaim over aol’s client, and to other clients such as trillian. It is open source, so the potential for evil is greatly diminished.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

You can use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep track of the annotations added to the image or make links on your own blog/web site/email that are pointing to the annotations on the image. The links leads right to the points in the image. ImaNote is Open Source and Free Software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

Then, I saw a discussion thread on the DOS groups asking “hey, why doesn’t someone write their own free version of DOS?” Remember, this was about three years after Linus Torvalds announced his work on the Linux kernel, and by 1993 Linux had shown that free software can achieve incredible results. So in 1994, the suggestion that we could write our own free version of DOS, and give it away with the source code so others could work with it and improve it, really didn’t sound all that far-fetched.

Look at the capitalistic giant, Microsoft! Imagine that there were no free software movement and open source. Microsoft would be the ultimate monopolist, the whole world would be their empire. In such case, there would be no real progress and innovation because there is no force to drive it.

This history can be very educational to the new Linux user. It gives a definite flare and flavor as to how the open source and free software movement got started. I knew of bits and pieces of the history but All About Linux has put it in a nice concise form I have never seen before.

That post put me to thinking. I like reading blogs about things that happen to people - snapshots of their day and so on. Now I feel that it is time for me to reveal a dark secret. When I created this blog, it was more in the nature of an experiment than anything serious; I was wondering how the free software installed by my ISP (Free.fr) actually worked. Then the idea of writing posts fascinated me, so I continued, and now, a hundred or so posts and four months on, I feel quite guilty if I don’t update regularily (not guilty enough to actually update, it seems…).

Microsoft is offering free software development tools for *free* at its website. Yup! The so-called “evil empire” is offering an “Express” version of Visual Studio and MS SQL Server 2005 for free and it can be downloaded here.

A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.

Today, I tried to edit the new GSR-website with an editor under Windows. No, I'm not crazy. This is all because we now have an employee at the GSR who'll update our website with new contact-info, meeting reports, news,... He's a windows user at home, so I needed to find a sufficient editor for that platform. Requirements: free software (as in free beer) and keep my original files in utf-8 character encoding!

Oh, and speaking of hackers, have I mentioned this is all built exclusively on top of free software?

The recent case of the Mambo Content Management System for websites shows that these issues aren’t a problem in the free software world. Following a split from the company that held the copyright in Mambo over the direction of the project, the entire development team took the existing code with them to continue working on it as "Joomla", something made possible by the free software licensing of Mambo.

In 2003-4 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spent more than $200,000 on an ‘educational’ course for schoolchildren, bizarrely entitled ‘What’s the Diff? A Guide to Digital Citizenship’. This was nothing more than a lesson in IP dogma. ‘If you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it,’ students were told – eliding fair use, public domain works, Free Software, and alternative licensing in one sweep of the revisionist hand. Teachers worked from a -page classroom guide, explaining that the use of a computer to download files was ‘morally and ethically wrong.’ Students played roles such as ‘The Film Producer’ and ‘The Starving Artist’; at the end of one session, according to an article in the Boston Globe, a teacher asked a boy: ‘’Will you stop copying music online and download the right way?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I’ll go to the music store and buy more CDs.’1 Alongside the propaganda comes bribery: for writing essays about why file sharing is bad, students are offered incentives such as free DVD players and DVDs (first one’s free, but they’re hooked forever), movie tickets and trips to Hollywood.

The state of Massachusetts is considering a proposal that would require all state documents to be compliant with the Open Document format rather than requiring proprietary software. The Open Document format is part of Open Office 2.0, a free software suite that is currently under development. Saying that the proposal is not “an anti-Microsoft initiative,” Peter Quinn, chief information officer of the Commonwealth, pointed out that 200-year-old papers remain readable in their original format. He said he hopes that today’s records will remain accessible far into the future, regardless of the comings and goings of various vendors and their products. Quinn said he hopes Microsoft will decide to support the format, which allows documents to be readable by any computer, similar to Adobe PDF. Microsoft’s Alan Yates said the company would not agree to the Open Document format. He noted that Microsoft provides a free XML schema that allows users without Microsoft Office to read documents created by that suite of applications.

Phelios announced the release of an offline internet software tool for webmasters called, "RSS Writer." The free software application is being offered to website owners who would like to offer an RSS feed of their own sites.

Next, I'm moving on to cover free development softwares - softwares used by software developer. How entrepreneurs in software related business can leverage on free softwares written by their counterparts.

I was having trouble finding a good free FTP client. SmartFTP advertises itself as free, but you get a nag screen after 30 days of use. I tire of having to track down/apply cracks for software all the time, and I try to find truly free software whenever I can. Due to its misleading name, I originally thought Filezilla was the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at an FTP client. Believing in Mozilla software so much, I didn’t even test the software first, I just deleted SmartFTP and started Filezilla. Filezilla is in fact NOT a member of the Mozilla family, but I haven’t been disappointed anyway. Though I’m using FireFTP more and more for smaller FTP transactions, major uploads (lots of files that may need to be uploaded in several sessions for example) are still done through Filezilla. Great FTP client, especially for the price.

Jonathan Schwartz, one of the highest on the food chain at Sun Microsystems, has a great post entitled Free Software Has No Pirates. Perhaps the most interesting line from the whole essay is:

There is nothing wrong or immoral about making money. The economic development of the planet including the poorest members of society depends on everyone being able to generate an income. This is nicely articulated by Jeffrey Sachs in his book “The End of Poverty”. If there’s nothing inherently wrong with making money and we all, even the staff of the Mozilla Foundation, need to do it in order to put food on the table then why is Mitchell so coy about where the money comes from? Maybe the problem is that once you start digging beneath the surface a little bit it turns out that the free software movement is just as dependant on “filthy lucre” as the rest of us. It may in fact be more dependant than commercial software companies because it has no other independant source of income. The reality is that the Mozilla Foundation is nicely capitalized and funded in various ways by some very large, very profitable commercial companies and a few rich donors. I could not seem to find a list of these benefactors on the Mozilla Foundation site; again I'm puzzled by the apprent lack of transparency. Why does the core principle of openness appear not to extend to how the Foundation is financed?

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

The main system for talking over the Internet is something called SIP (Session Initiated Protocol), which like many modern standards seems to be designed by hardware makers to get people to buy expensive stuff. However, the open source/free software people are moving in and have made some good progress lately. See Gizmo, for example. There's also a Skype competitor called Jajah that allows you to talk with Skype users. There will be more options in the future, but at the moment Skype is king if you want it to just work, and work very simply.

There are plenty of sources of free topographic maps that someone with a GPS and some good GPS mapping software can use. (Yes, I paid for MacGPS Pro. It works, and the free software I’d played with was pretty unreliable.) Most of the topographic map files out there are in GeoTIFF format, or something similar, which means that they have pixel to lat/lon data built-in. But I’m more likely to need street maps than topographic maps. I could buy something like Microsoft Streets and Trips, but I’m using Mac. Route USA 2004 is the only street map software I can find that runs on OS X, and it doesn’t appear to be very good. I couldn’t find a source of free high quality street maps online, so I rolled my own. Here’s how:

In my opinion there is absolutely no free software available today that is cooler than this. Google Earth, a 3D interface to the planet. Here’s some screen shots for ya:

'Viva Software Libre!' talks about 'Latin America's free software revolution challenges U.S. corporate domination', which is very much true in description of what is happening throughout Latin America through Free Software and Open Source. And he mixes it in with the Banana Wars. Of course, not many people know about where the phrase Banana republic came from. And it's sort of disturbing that a clothing chain gets a capital 'r' for Republic in the Wikipedia.

The purpose of ther GPL is not to make people accept open source software - the GPL is about Free Software. Open Source software is in a legally and morally weaker position than Free Software. In addition to this the GPL contains within it a fundamental social goal which Open Source does not.