GPL - Page number 2

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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What does authentic open source community governance look like? An open source community will involve many people gathering for their own independent reasons around a free software commons with source code licensed under an OSI-approved open source license. But there's more to software freedom than just the license. » Read more

In December, the long awaited version 2.0 of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) was released by the European Commission. Version 1.0 had defined “open standard” as royalty-free, a definition of enormous impact on standards policy because it focused on the user perspective rather than the perspective of standards development organizations. Some standards organizations claim that “open standards” refers only to the way the standard was developed – not the terms of availability. » Read more

In the first half of this two-part series, author, artist, and hard-working mom Beverly Pearl discusses the challenges (and rewards) of creating of a collaborative, inexpensive, self-published art show book with open source tools. This project provides a way for the artists and community to work together, gain new skills, and deliver a professional-looking product—while hopefully raising some money for a good cause. » Read more

A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements – collectively termed “contributor agreements” by some – used by many open source projects. » Read more

Eben Moglen's keynote address at LinuxCon last week, "Doing What it Takes: Current Legal Issues in Defending FOSS," called for a strategic shift in the free software movement. Moglen, the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and one of the principal drafters of the GPLv3, said the economy of sharing and the economy of ownership are not mutually hostile, but mutually reinforcing, then outlined three steps for ensuring the continued coexistence between the free software and business communities. » Read more