Last July 6, the free-software community and programmers everywhere awaited a
showdown in the European parliament over software patents. The outcome was
far from predictable.
If we, the free-software proponents, had lost, it would have been a final
defeat in Europe. The relevant part of the European commission works hand in
glove with the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and a BSA lawyer actually
wrote much of the text of the draft directive the commission proposed. (We
know this because they were so foolish as to publish it as a Word file, which
contained information about who wrote what.)
Most of the national governments voted in favour of software patents at the
council of ministers - some in disregard of the explicit instructions of
their own parliaments. Some gover... (more)
(LinuxWorld) -- Since Joe Barr's article criticized my dealings with
SIGLINUX, I would like to set the record straight about what actually
occurred, and state my reasons.
When SIGLINUX invited me to speak, it was a "Linux User Group"; that is, a
group for users of the GNU/Linux system which calls the whole system "Linux".
So I replied politely that if they'd like someone from the GNU Proj... (more)
Headnote
As of December 2006, Sun is in the middle of rereleasing its Java platform
under the GNU GPL. When this license change is completed, we expect that Java
will no longer be a trap. Nonetheless, the general issue described here will
remain important, because any non-free library or programming platform can
cause a similar problem. We must learn a lesson from the history of Java, so ... (more)
Don Rosenberg's review in LWM (Vol. 3, issue 4) of Larry Rosen's book, Open
Source Licensing, did double-duty as a platform for FUD about the GNU GPL.
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL for short) was not the first free
software license, but was the first to embody the concept of "copyleft": the
requirement that all modified and extended versions of the program be free
under the same... (more)
[Dee-Ann LeBlanc mused recently here at LinuxWorld.com on the vexed question
of whether in the Linux community we are letting politics have too much sway
over and above the technology. Here are Richard Stallman's thoughts on that
same issue, just received...far from sharing this worry, on the contrary he
is concerned that a narrow focus on technological developments "might
distract our b... (more)
Richard Stallman is the founder of the Gnu Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. He is the principal or initial author of GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger GDB and parts of other packages. He is also president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
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