Richard Stallman

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7 Notable Legal Developments in Open Source in 2016

In 2012 the jury in the first Oracle v. Google trial found that Google's inclusion of Java core library APIs in Android infringed Oracle's copyright. The district court overturned the verdict, holding that the APIs as such were not copyrightable (either as individual method declarations or their "structure, sequence and organization" [SSO]). The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, applying 9th Circuit law, reversed, holding that the "declaring code and the [SSO] of the 37 Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, and in 2016 a closely watched second trial was held on Google's defense of fair use. In May 2016 the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Google...

Building a Bootstrapped Business on Open Source

Back in 2009, our day-to-day life at Planio was writing software for clients. Client work is often fun, but there can also be a feeling that you're stuck on a hamster wheel of endlessly churning through projects, always looking for new customers. We used Redmine, an open source project management tool built using the Ruby on Rails framework, to manage these projects. And then something curious started happening. We'd wrap up a project and our client would come to us asking if we'd consider letting them keep the project management tool...

Linux Won The Desktop Wars A Long Time Ago

Chris Hall | FOSS Force | February 7, 2013

Linux has won the desktop wars and Tux now represents the dominant desktop operating system. We’ve been in this position for a while now. The reason many of us haven’t recognized it is because this win doesn’t look anything like we thought it would. When wishes come true, they’re rarely what we envisioned. Read More »

Mainstream Academia Embraces Open Source Hardware

Twenty years ago, even staunch proponents of free and open source software like Richard Stallman questioned the social imperative for free hardware designs. Academics had barely started to consider the concept; the number of papers coming out annually on the topic were less than could be counted on someone's fingers. Not anymore! Not only has the ethical authority of Stallman embraced free hardware and free hardware design, but so has the academic community. Consider the graph below, which shows the number of articles on open source hardware indexed by Google Scholar each year from 2000 to 2017. In the last 17 years, the concept of open source hardware has erupted in ivory towers throughout the world. Now more than 1,000 articles are written on the topic every year.

Man Overboard: GNOME Cofounder Joins The Mac Side

Katherine Noyes | LinuxInsider | March 11, 2013

It seems fair to say that the FOSS community sees its ranks expand just about every day, as new fans of free and open source software join the fold. Just look at the fledgling Linux Advocates site for a shining example. Read More »

Microsoft In OPEN-SOURCE .Net Love-In With New Foundation

Neil McAllister | The Register | April 4, 2014

Microsoft has opened its .Net programming framework to the developer community by releasing the code for a broad range of .Net-related software as open-source projects under the stewardship of a new, dedicated foundation.  The surprise announcement came during the Thursday keynote at Redmond's annual Build developer conference, taking place this week in San Francisco.

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Oldies But Goodies: Seven Projects Still Rocking Open Source

Dave Gruber | Open Source Delivers | October 2, 2012

We all get excited about the latest hot open source projects like CloudStack and Boot to Gecko — they’re new and exciting and the possibilities seem endless.  But what about the many long-running projects that have been core to the world of open source for decades? The ones that have truly stood the test of time? Read More »

Open Source Hardware : Less Costly Works Best

Staff Writer | The Customize Windows | December 8, 2012

[...] Richard Stallman initiated the Free Software Movement, for whom, we are now using various softwares, services for free or at lesser cost; in the same way, Open Source Hardware makes the devices less costly, affordable and breaks vendor lock in. Read More »

Open Up To Open Standards

V. Sridhar | The Hindu Business Line | April 11, 2013

As we foray in to 2013 and beyond, we see the emergence of everything open (open source, open standards, open courses, open data, open innovation and open spectrum)...While the verdict is yet to be out, there is already a widespread acceptance from the industry on the following openness. Read More »

Sébastien Jodogne, ReGlue are Free Software Award winners

Press Release | Free Software Foundation | March 21, 2015

Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan announced the winners of the FSF's annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 21st, held during the LibrePlanet 2015 conference at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts...The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Sébastien Jodogne for his work on free software medical imaging with his project Orthanc.

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Stallman, Andreessen, Swartz Among Internet Hall Of Fame’s Latest Inductees

Nur Bremmen | Memeburn | June 27, 2013

It’s easy to forget that there was a time before the internet, but everything we take for granted now [...] comes off the back of seriously pioneering work. Read More »

Stop Patent Mischief By Curbing Patent Enforcement

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld | November 9, 2012

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Software patents are evil. They allow the work of innovators to be ambushed and raise the cost of technology innovation. But finding a viable solution to the software patent mess isn't easy. Read More »

The 10 oldest, significant open-source programs

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | ZDNet | January 13, 2013

Does open-source software still seem "new" to you? Think again, its roots go back decades. Read More »

The Next Open Source Frontier Is the Farm

By scaling precision agriculture technologies to smaller sustainable agriculture systems, it should be possible to make many more crops and growing systems economically feasible without compromising environmental health and sustainabilty. This could mean more locally grown, organic food grown profitably in more communities and accessible to more people at lower cost—a huge win for small farmers. And it could mean that change is possible in large-scale farm management practices as well... Read More »

What the History of Open Source Teaches Us About Strategic Advantage

The free software movement started like many other movements: A group of bright, spirited people felt controlled by a greater power and rose up and took matters into their own hands. It's not that different from the American Revolution. The colonists were tired of being controlled by Great Britain, so they declared their independence and started building their own system of government and military, and creating their own cultures. The revolutionaries' methods were disorganized and improvised, but they ultimately proved to be effective. Same goes for the software revolutionaries...