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Look, Dude. When you're talking about RMS and FSF there's no such thing as too many links.

I like what Brad wrote. Here is something on licensing and car software I wrote several years ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615

== what have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought? ===

Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise
some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the
driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities,
which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors.
Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice
these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest
physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the
codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in
their heads).

We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly
funded software and selling modified versions of such software as
proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of
paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter
how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such
self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban
planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means
of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the
work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially,
will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or
will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community
development process?

Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality
http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and
more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000
Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of
thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps
people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with
public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?

Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary
because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in
early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual.
It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best
to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are
talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to
disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong
here.

And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already
for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly
proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more
complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex
environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much
faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our
lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally
avoided in daily life.

Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive
intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every
American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the
automotive software engineers and their employers will do well
financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their
software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of
configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of
their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* wit

There are very serious sounding concerns about the iPhone privacy and the huge private data feed the GSM/3G provider gets. The device is designed in such a way that.. If it wasn't Apple, I would call it spyphone.

FSF has added their own DRM/Ogg issues (which I don't always agree) but there are more issues with the privacy of the device itself.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g

I trust to Apple, I am kind of person who sends his system profile to them when I add a new device... What concerns me is the network provider... That is a very serious concern especially in countries which "they already follow you".

PS: To .ogg people: get a openstep/cocoa experienced objective C developer, let him/her code oggplay.app which will generate zero warnings and entirely coded abiding Apple guidelines, submit it to app store , if Apple doesn't allow... You can speak.

Big images used for text? Wtf?

I guess this might give a nice boost to finally opening the horrible old, buggy, slow proprietary BIOSes.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

For such a staunch FSF idealist, I find it ironic that you infringed on their copyright by failing to include the required notice in your copy and paste job.

So, unless they attempt to pass laws against the use of closed-source software, please stop with the "they're trying to impose their views on mine" crap, they're just excercising their "free speech" rights.

I'm pretty sure I've seen people arguing for doing just that.

Also, " At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline. ". This is the same kind of "forcing" that I've heard old missionaries would sometimes do, "we'll help with X / teach you X, but only if you come to church and pay tithes", and it stinks.

Currently, the position taken by the FSF is one of whether something is user upgradable. If it is, then it should be free software.

As for cellphones, http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g/.

You can help make sure there are.

Join the FSF.

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/cameras

Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source - and software written by Richard Stallman isn't Open Source - it's Free Software, and RMS is happy to explain the difference.

I'm squarely in Stallman's camp; my audio project Ogg Frog is definitely Free Software, not Open Source.

How the hell can software bee Free but not Open?!

I'll grant you that not all Open Source software may meet all the requirements of Free Software, but it seems to me the reverse is most definitely true.

Software is Open is the source is availlable and you can modify it if you like. I can't see any way in which a piece of Free Software would not meet those very simple requirements.

You see, the distinction isn't the license - it's the purpose behind making the project either Open or Free.

The purpose the maker had has no impact on what you can do with the software. The license does.

As Stallman explains, Open Source is about efficiency - volunteer coders, and "many eyeballs" finding and correcting bugs and security holes. Free Software is about creating a community

And so is Open Source. What do you think those volunteers and eyeballs are?

Thus I long ago gave up trying to describe Ogg Frog as Free Software in casual conversation. I only say that when speaking to others who will likely understand. Most of the time I describe it as Open Source, but feel guilty in doing so.

Don't feel guilty. Free Software is Open Source. It's a special kind of Open Source.

Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source - and software written by Richard Stallman isn't Open Source - it's Free Software, and RMS is happy to explain the difference.

I'm squarely in Stallman's camp; my audio project Ogg Frog is definitely Free Software, not Open Source.

You see, the distinction isn't the license - it's the purpose behind making the project either Open or Free.

As Stallman explains, Open Source is about efficiency - volunteer coders, and "many eyeballs" finding and correcting bugs and security holes. Free Software is about creating a community - Stallman has made it very clear he hopes to get back to the way things were back in the day, when source was shared openly with no non-disclosure agreements, copyrights or licenses.

Unfortunately, the English language has a problem: Free can mean "as in Freedom", or "without cost". When I speak of my Free Software project to non-techie people, they think I'm just not going to charge money for it, and question my sanity. They have no clue about the meaning behind Free Software.

Spanish doesn't have that problem: Free as in Freedom is "Libre", free as in beer is "gratis". But those words don't make sense to English speakers.

I have developed a convention, but it's too subtle for most to take notice. Perhaps they will if you join me: I capitalize the "F" if it's "Free as in Freedom", but use lowercase for "free as in beer". I think that emphasizes the difference, and maybe if we all wrote it that way, more people would understand.

Stallman is a great man, IMHO, but he has a marketing and image problem: very few non-technical people have the first clue as to what Free Software means. Most think it means "freeware".

But Open Source doesn't have that problem; many who don't know source code from Shinola do understand what Open Source is all about.

Thus I long ago gave up trying to describe Ogg Frog as Free Software in casual conversation. I only say that when speaking to others who will likely understand. Most of the time I describe it as Open Source, but feel guilty in doing so. I feel like Matthew in these verses:

Peter said unto him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice. -- John 13, 37-38

(BTW - there's no Ogg Frog to download yet, not even CVS or Subversion. Out of consideration for my non-technical target market, I'm not releasing anything until it reaches it's planned 1.0 feature set, and is reasonably bug free. At least for non-technical users, I feel The Cathedral is better than The Bazaar.

I believe Gnu's Affero GPL is intended for this domain.

For projects where RMS was personally involved, gunzip|grep for 'Stallman' in your /usr/share/man/man1. For me this gives cat, comm, diff, dir, gdb, ls, make, rm, split, tee, uniq and vdir, most of which I use very often. Of course this leaves out large programs where the author list is not given explicitly, such as gcc or emacs.

For software linked with the GNU project, have a look at this list.

The guy's had a great influence over many important free-software projects, both directly and indirectly.

Uh, how about GCC and just about everything else maintained by GNU? If you're using Linux, chances are you're using a lot of GPL 3 stuff without even knowing it. Stallman isn't entirely crazy for wanting it called GNU/Linux

Imaginary Crime would be a better name than IP Crime. Imaginary property theft should lead to imaginary punishment. It would be more proper for the MPAA to prove real losses in civil court, which would be hard to do seeing as the movies in question all had record breaking revenue. Criminal copyright laws are absurd.

Run your code through superopt. If you spend your idle time doing that then each experiment will complete faster giving you more idle time to superopt that.

GPLv2 says:

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
        to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
        allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
        received the program in object code or executable form with such
        an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

Actually, it says you must OFFER TO PROVIDE the source. So, yes, they can make each user request a copy, i.e. through a form on a website. And before you cry foul about my interpretation, take a quick read (from ):

If they send him the source tomorrow, and change one web page to include the offer and a request form, they are in the clear. And my interpretation would suggest that they could then ignore all emailed requests for source.

And reading this and their site, it seems that Minerva only distributes the middleware. From their main page: "iTVManager is a field proven solution for launching, operating and growing a profitable IPTV service. The TV user interface has all the latest HD and PVR features and runs on a variety of leading set-top boxes from ADB, Amino, Cisco/SA, Entone and Motorola." Would not it not be more correct to say that ADB, Amino, Cisco/SA, Entone, and Motorola would be the parties required to distribute the source since they are the ones who actually gave the binaries to the customer?

Anyway, if the source code isn't shipped with the binaries the license requires that the binaries are accompanied with a written offer to give a machine-readable copy of the source code "on a medium customarily used for software interchange" (paper is disqualified again...) to any third party. The last part really means "anyone that asks" according to the GPL FAQ, even people who haven't received binaries from those who offer the source code.

I'm new to this idiocy you've churned up, but I can offer up a hearty rofl. This absurd waste of time is about as well considered and persuasive as bad vista, only it's chock full of 'more of the same'!

Vista is dominating just as we all new it would. Your lengthy and excited list of all the failures doesn't make a bit of difference, and the people screaming about you make even less difference. Independent developers and hardware are all flocking to it and discovering that most of your complaints are devious lies or founded on willful ignorance. This only makes FLOSSY look more like the bow backed nag she is.

to summarize, massive FAIL for everyone here 'cepts me and my vista machines. HAND

ODF is compatible with the GPL and open source licences.

Freeing up IP is essential for making health, education and the energy market cheaper and more universal. In the last 5 to 10 years, first world governments have been 'pulling up the ladder' in this regard rather than opening up to the people. It's almost as though they are anticipating something

Progress is made by shared invention. Once upon a time invention sharing was universal but progress was slow. Then we had copyrights and patents and the intent of these was to encourage investment in invention by granting a temporary monopoly on it. That worked for a while. Economic interests have spoiled this by extending the monopoly into eternity and twisting the word invention to absurdity. These days people are choosing to share their invention from the beginning or not at all.

It may be time to end the zenlike "temporary yet eternal" monopolies granted under copyright and patent.

There are many signs that M$ is in trouble and that Vista is a failure. This is going to be a list of those signs. This is what Vista looks like to me. It is such a flop it can take M$ down, which would put an end to their attacks on free software, free software advocates and reasonable standards. Vista's failure is the predicted, practical result of a business model that tries to keep customers helpless and divided.

The six year development was troubled and expensive. There were signs that nothing important had changed. Promissed features evaporated and those that came through were downright creepy.

• January 1, 2004 - Jim Allichin sees the future and does not like it.
• July 9, 2004 - Vista troubles go public, rebuild is promissed but never delivered as is clear from legacy bugs.
• March 26, 2006 - M$ Employees Revolt over delays.
• A buggy launch was insured and hardware doomed because XP driver compatibility was intentionally broken just before RTM.
• January 30, 2007 - Vista is officially released. Jim Allchin retires.

Then came real use and real problems for users: security problems, devices not working, features dropped, competitors run off and high costs.

• An objective study of the Vista UI shows the changes have made things worse, not better for users who make it past install, broken software and hardware.
• Basic operations are broken. File copy, for example, takes forever and may fail because it can consume all of your memory. Memory used this way is not released until reboot. IPv6 does not work.
• M$ considers network degradation for media protection normal, so network performance is about 10% of what you get from XP or anything else.
• Insane anti-piracy harms the innocent. An anti-piracy server accidently disabled the nicer parts and required all XP and Vista users to "reauthenticate". Just a few weeks later, M$ made things even worse with a new BSoD for "pirates". They backpedaled a little and now Vista is nagware instead of deadware. The system remains a booby trap. So much as changing a video card will disable your system without warning. People with cracked coppies laugh but M$ can pull the plug for anyone else anytime for any reason.
• Business as usual has not improved security. New problems have been added to the seemingly endless supply of legacy bugs. There are reports of double extensio

There are many signs that M$ is in trouble and that Vista is a failure. This is going to be a list of those signs. This is what Vista looks like to me. It is such a flop it can take M$ down, which would put an end to their attacks on free software, free software advocates and reasonable standards. Vista's failure is the predicted, practical result of a business model that tries to keep customers helpless and divided.

The six year development was troubled and expensive. There were signs that nothing important had changed. Promissed features evaporated and those that came through were downright creepy.

• January 1, 2004 - Jim Allichin sees the future and does not like it.
• July 9, 2004 - Vista troubles go public, rebuild is promissed but never delivered as is clear from legacy bugs.
• March 26, 2006 - M$ Employees Revolt over delays.
• A buggy launch was insured and hardware doomed because XP driver compatibility was intentionally broken just before RTM.
• January 30, 2007 - Vista is officially released. Jim Allchin retires.

Then came real use and real problems for users: security problems, devices not working, features dropped, competitors run off and high costs.

• An objective study of the Vista UI shows the changes have made things worse, not better for users who make it past install, broken software and hardware.
• Basic operations are broken. File copy, for example, takes forever and may fail because it can consume all of your memory. Memory used this way is not released until reboot. IPv6 does not work.
• M$ considers network degradation for media protection normal, so network performance is about 10% of what you get from XP or anything else.
• Insane anti-piracy harms the innocent. An anti-piracy server accidently disabled the nicer parts and required all XP and Vista users to "reauthenticate". Just a few weeks later, M$ made things even worse with a new BSoD for "pirates". They backpedaled a little and now Vista is nagware instead of deadware. The system remains a booby trap. So much as changing a video card will disable your system without warning. People with cracked coppies laugh but M$ can pull the plug for anyone else anytime for any reason.
• Business as usual has not improved security. New problems have been added to the seemingly endless supply of legacy bugs. There are reports of double extensio

There are many signs that M$ is in trouble and that Vista is a failure. This is going to be a list of those signs. This is what Vista looks like to me. It is such a flop it can take M$ down, which would put an end to their attacks on free software, free software advocates and reasonable standards. Vista's failure is the predicted, practical result of a business model that tries to keep customers helpless and divided.

The six year development was troubled and expensive. There were signs that nothing important had changed. Promissed features evaporated and those that came through were downright creepy.

• January 1, 2004 - Jim Allichin sees the future and does not like it.
• July 9, 2004 - Vista troubles go public, rebuild is promissed but never delivered as is clear from legacy bugs.
• March 26, 2006 - M$ Employees Revolt over delays.
• A buggy launch was insured and hardware doomed because XP driver compatibility was intentionally broken just before RTM.
• January 30, 2007 - Vista is officially released. Jim Allchin retires.

Then came real use and real problems for users: security problems, devices not working, features dropped, competitors run off and high costs.

• An objective study of the Vista UI shows the changes have made things worse, not better for users who make it past install, broken software and hardware.
• Basic operations are broken. File copy, for example, takes forever and may fail because it can consume all of your memory. Memory used this way is not released until reboot. IPv6 does not work.
• M$ considers network degradation for media protection normal, so network performance is about 10% of what you get from XP or anything else.
• Insane anti-piracy harms the innocent. An anti-piracy server accidently disabled the nicer parts and required all XP and Vista users to "reauthenticate". Just a few weeks later, M$ made things even worse with a new BSoD for "pirates". They backpedaled a little and now Vista is nagware instead of deadware. The system remains a booby trap. So much as changing a video card will disable your system without warning. People with cracked coppies laugh but M$ can pull the plug for anyone else anytime for any reason.
• Business as usual has not improved security. New problems have been added to the seemingly endless supply of legacy bugs. There are reports of double extensio

There are many signs that M$ is in trouble and that Vista is a failure. This is going to be a list of those signs. This is what Vista looks like to me. It is such a flop it can take M$ down, which would put an end to their attacks on free software, free software advocates and reasonable standards. Vista's failure is the predicted, practical result of a business model that tries to keep customers helpless and divided.

The six year development was troubled and expensive. There were signs that nothing important had changed. Promissed features evaporated and those that came through were downright creepy.

• January 1, 2004 - Jim Allichin sees the future and does not like it.
• July 9, 2004 - Vista troubles go public, rebuild is promissed but never delivered as is clear from legacy bugs.
• March 26, 2006 - M$ Employees Revolt over delays.
• A buggy launch was insured and hardware doomed because XP driver compatibility was intentionally broken just before RTM.
• January 30, 2007 - Vista is officially released. Jim Allchin retires.

Then came real use and real problems for users: security problems, devices not working, features dropped, competitors run off and high costs.

• An objective study of the Vista UI shows the changes have made things worse, not better for users who make it past install, broken software and hardware.
• Basic operations are broken. File copy, for example, takes forever and may fail because it can consume all of your memory. Memory used this way is not released until reboot. IPv6 does not work.
• M$ considers network degradation for media protection normal, so network performance is about 10% of what you get from XP or anything else.
• Insane anti-piracy harms the innocent. An anti-piracy server accidently disabled the nicer parts and required all XP and Vista users to "reauthenticate". Just a few weeks later, M$ made things even worse with a new BSoD for "pirates". They backpedaled a little and now Vista is nagware instead of deadware. The system remains a booby trap. So much as changing a video card will disable your system without warning. People with cracked coppies laugh but M$ can pull the plug for anyone else anytime for any reason.
• Business as usual has not improved security. New problems have been added to the seemingly endless supply of legacy bugs. There are reports of double extensio

The terms of the GPL or LGPL don't bind the copyright holder. He could license it under GPL or LGPL of the ExtJS public license. Or he could edit out some of the terms of the LGPL, add in a few more and license the code under that.

The FSF won't necessarily approve ...

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

... but it's not like they could sue him for using a modified version their license as far as I can see.

Read all about it.

I know it's incredibly bad form to keep replying to my own posts, but I think this is an important subject. :) Please see also http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs and http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs. These seem to largely agree with my viewpoint that it isn't inherently prohibited, but there may be legal problems, and you should consider adding exceptions to your program's license to explicitly allow linking with required non-free libraries.

However, their arguments seem to rely on the concept of linking - including static linking - being some sort of "magic" that results in a derived work. Not everyone agrees with this concept, provided that what you're linking with isn't modified. For example, see this LKML post by Linus Torvalds: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/17/79. His views basically boil down to static linking being a form of aggregation, and dynamic linking of separate works having even less bearing since it doesn't necessarily require distribution of both works. Both, however, having bearing on whether or not two works are independent.

I know it's incredibly bad form to keep replying to my own posts, but I think this is an important subject. :) Please see also http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs and http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs. These seem to largely agree with my viewpoint that it isn't inherently prohibited, but there may be legal problems, and you should consider adding exceptions to your program's license to explicitly allow linking with required non-free libraries.

However, their arguments seem to rely on the concept of linking - including static linking - being some sort of "magic" that results in a derived work. Not everyone agrees with this concept, provided that what you're linking with isn't modified. For example, see this LKML post by Linus Torvalds: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/17/79. His views basically boil down to static linking being a form of aggregation, and dynamic linking of separate works having even less bearing since it doesn't necessarily require distribution of both works. Both, however, having bearing on whether or not two works are independent.

How many OSS webpages don't even EXPLAIN WHAT THE PRODUCT IS, much less document it, on their website?

Let me introduce you to Symantec. They make an application called "Ghostcast server", which is used to clone PCs in bulk. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out which product they offer contains this application, how much it costs and how it works. Give it a shot. It's like Where's Waldo for geeks.

Even when OSS project show some potential, they inevitably fork over some bullshit tussle between developers.

Like X? That was over quickly. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft decided to change their windowing environment and its terms, and it was so hated nobody would want it. Wait -- you don't have to pretend.

Back when I was maintaining a somewhat popular free software project, I occasionally (very occasionally, twice over 10 years) got offers of donations. Both time I thanked for the thought, and suggested a donation to the FSF instead. Really, I did it as a hobby, and didn't want the moral obligations coming from accepting money.

Send a "thank you" letter to those who do not solicit donations, and tell them why their software is useful to you. It means surprisingly much

How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.

I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.

Yes. ...
Here is the list of free software regarding databases: http://directory.fsf.org/category/db/, but...
A flat file in a unix file system is already a "Database", as long as you have a text editor, (an emacs exists for w32 @ http://www.cygwin.com./ if a file contains data, it is a database. the only thing particular to more official databases is that these files are always interpreted using the same structure of rows and columns, and indexes are created and maintained, and more complicated bells and whistles added, but
-This can be completely done with shell scripts(bash is also available for winbloze fm w/in cygwin).
-Or, emacs has a planner.el program that keeps and organizes flat files of data in ways that would satisfy your needs.
-There is an emacs wiki system that can be very easily bent to your needs, and is used in planner.el, and
-There is a product called remember.el that will keep track of anything you want, and allows easy reviewing of when and where and what you wanted to note down about your information.
-There is a database system built with emacs lisp called EDB available here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mernst/software/edb/ and it is excellent. It is extensively and clearly documented, and is very easy to use.
There are many interfaces to existing database languages using emacs front ends, and there are many more available in common lisp, which u can use in emacs. The cygwin link gets you the most unixlike environment available for win-vistasux-doze to run your emacs in and is very easy to install and maintain, but there is another emacs for win32 built in the-land-of-the-lost(windows) without cygwin, here: http://www.neuralwiki.org/index.php?title=Installing_EMACS

Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)

This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Lemme give you an anecdote: fifteen years ago, I received a proprietary program that I used in a research project. It was written for a slightly different architecture, but because I found out that I only had to MODIFY a few low-level C I/O routines in the SOURCE, we could use it on our SGI Indy & spent about a CPU-year using that program to do our calculations. Great success!

The point is, that having access to the source, but not explicitly the right to modify it to suit whatever workstation you have available for your work, is often useless, both in an open source context or in an (effectively) closed-source context.

So, if I understand correctly, if this particular program had been licensed under the Ms-RL license I would have had the same freedom (and then some, because it's apparently an open source license), but if it had been licensed under the Ms-LRL license, it would have been absolutely useless to me, because I wouldn't have access to the same computing platform as where the code had been written, and I would have been forbidden to modify it.

Ms-RL good, Ms-LRL *BAD*. I find this choice of license names by Microsoft very confusing. Especially if you contrast it with the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL (LGPL Less restricted than GPL).

Also, the FSF claims that these Microsoft licenses are incompatible with the GPL (which was written much earlier), so I think Microsoft did this on purpose.

If you're interested, there was a discussion on this on the LWN site last year.

As to the rest of your post, I don't actually understand what you mean, sorry.

And I'd love to know if they can get a laptop to actually work 100% on nothing but free software as even RMS had to give up wireless on the OLPC to have it run all free software. And slightly OF,but is Negroponte serious about switching OLPC to Windows only and actually trying to bolt sugar on top of XP? Trying to run XP on it would be bad enough due to the weak specs,but trying to bolt the sugar interface as a shell on top of XP would add MORE overhead and drag performance down even worse than trying to run XP on it. IMHO if he goes this route the little OLPC will just quietly die as the performance will be so damned slow and painful that you won't be able to get kids to mess with it even for free. But like I said that's my 02c on the subject. Maybe he has some way to make it work,hell if I know.

There's what they (FSF) call freedom 2, "The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor". They are now saying that some forms of that are not helpful enough (despite people being willing to pay money for this help), and therefore forbidden.

Actually, that may well be coming in the next version of the GPL. For now, it's a separate license, but I suspect future versions of the GPL will be such that if you write any application based on GPL'd code which provides a service to anyone but yourself, you must provide the users of your service with the source code for that service. This particularly hits Google, with its web services, but I suspect it will be expanded to include any service (e.g., a mail server).

Perhaps more interesting will be when the FSF guys start to address the "content loophole." I.e., if you create content with GPL'd software (or with software derived from GPL'd code), you must provide the source code for the software when you distribute the created content. If I put on my "freedom" hat, that seems like a perfectly rational thing. (If, for example, I wrote a GPL'd 3-D modeling program and some game company modifies it and uses it to help create their next blockbuster, I'd at least like to get the source code for their improvements, even if I don't get a cut of the revenue from the game.) If I put on any other hat (or no hat at all), it seems bonkers, though.

Don't use an Intel or AMD CPU. The schematics of those CPUs are not Open. Nor is the schematic diagram of your motherboard, monitor etc.

They are questioning whether or not Ubuntu classifies as open source, because the parent company might want to make money. The entire preposition here is flawed and silly.

1. "certain special cases": Limited to works where reasonable investigation does not turn up the copyright owner's identity.
2. "which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work": Works to which this bill applies are no longer exploited.
3. "and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder": The copyright owner can retrieve his interest in the revenue from a work by filing a tax return on the work.