FOSS

On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was "merely descriptive."

Trademarks are intended to identify a specific source of goods or services, protecting that source from confusion in the minds of consumers with other sources. Naturally then, if you try to obtain a trademark which is just a description of a type of product or service, it is proper that you should be refused; it would not be distinctive and it would distort the market by allowing one source to control the generic term. If I market a car for a hamster, I should not be able to get a trademark for the name hamster car, as that would improperly restrain competitors from bringing their own hamster cars to market. So, should we be pleased that the application was rejected?

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During my second year at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women's University, the first of its kind in India as well as in South-East Asia, I attended a workshop on Python and Orca by Krishnakant Mane. My classmates and I were novices to free and open source software (FOSS) and astonished when we saw a visually impaired person using a computer with the same ease as we did.

I was aware of Linux and had learned the basics of Unix as a freshman, but I had never used Ubuntu, which I thought might be command driven. It had a great interface and there was a lot of new technology for us to learn. That day not only was our class introduced to a new world of open source, but so was the university as a whole.  » Read more

Few women have been historically applying for Google Summer of Code, a program in which Google provides stipends for students to work for three months on FOSS projects. Last year, after many efforts by both the Google team and the community to increase the diversity in the program, about 100 of 1200 participants or 8.3% were women, which was a highest level of participation by women yet. » Read more

FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

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The impact of software has changed our lives. But the average technology consumer doesn't realize how important having access to source code and an open development process is to our overall freedom. Keith Curtis, a University of Michigan dropout turned decade-long programmer at Microsoft turned open source advocate, wants to change that. 

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The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by December 2012. In addition, a Dr. Dobbs' survey in the third quarter of 2012 stated that more than 90% of developers are using FOSS in two of the most rapidly growing areas, cloud computing and mobile computing.

Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2012 are as follows.

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Let's say you want to understand what makes free and open source software (FOSS) so vital today—and what makes those who write it so committed to their difficult work. How would you do this? » Read more

At the end of August I wrote a short post about an important reform that modified the rules for software adoption within the Italian public administration.

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Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country. » Read more

Free and open source software (FOSS) plays an indispensable role in developing countries. As it is often a substitute for more expensive proprietary software, it can impact the economy and progress of a country, like India, in a very positive way.

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