GPL

The free-market capitalistic definition of companies' goals was, for a long time, very simple: to make as much profit as possible. With that in mind, the only difference between a success and a failure was the investor's return on investment. Short-term profit became priority number one. However, this classic definition of capitalism hastransformed the way companies are perceived in the population over time. » Read more

Last week the Mozilla Foundation released version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License. Immediately recognized as a free software license by the Free Software Foundation and approved as an Open Source license by the Open Source Initiative, MPL 2.0 is a well-crafted modern license that ought to be considered by any open source project desiring a weak copyleft licensing policy. » Read more

In part one of my Mozilla Public License piece, I mentioned license compatibility as a major feature of MPL 2.0. In fact, it's such a major - and complicated - issue that it warrants its own explanation. » Read more

In the afternoon keynotes of the first day of LinuxCon, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down to talk about the twentieth anniversary of Linux with Jon "Maddog" Hall, Eben Moglen, and Dan Frye, or as Zemlin called them, The Godfather, The Lawyer, and The Suit. » Read more

This is the second part of a two-part article critiquing the output of Project Harmony. » Read more

Harmony, the Canonical-led effort to provide a comprehensive suite of contributor agreements for open source projects, has quietly released its version 1.0, a year after Canonical general counsel Amanda Brock announced the initiative on opensource.com. During most of that year, Harmony's construction took place out of the public view, in deliberations that were cloaked by the Chatham House Rule. » Read more

The Open Source Hardware and Design Aliance (OHANDA) aims to do for hardware what the Creative Commons does for intellectual property and the GPL does for software: open it up. By applying open source principles to trademarks, OHANDA hopes to free devices from some restrictions imposed by patent law and foster "sustainable sharing of open hardware and design." » Read more

The Boxee Box, available since November 2010 with firmware recently upated to 1.1, is a winning compromise that makes a Linux-based HTPC easy enough for the least technical user.

Linux-based HTPC (home theater PC) systems have been proliferating, and with good reason. Linux is known for being stable over long periods of time. You wouldn't want to have to reboot your cable box as often as you do a Windows machine, would you? » Read more

On the second semester of 2010, I had one of those great ideas for a short movie. I sat down and wrote the story, thinking about the narrative, the characters, the setting and pretty much everything that would relate to production. Finishing that, I just thought to myself: “now wouldn't it be nice if I could do it open source? I mean, all of it?” Being a free culture activist myself, it became important to find an answer to this question.

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