blog

The bad FSF

jue., 29 may 2008 20:53:46 +0200

I stumbled across this odd article: "All OSS Developers Are Equal, But Some OSS Developers Are More Equal Than Others!" where the FSF is criticized for being unfair to software developers and failed to close the "ASP Loophole".

For the authors of this article, the Affero GPL does not fix the problem, because "GPL developers won't use it". Well, if so, why should they switch to any other licence that addresses the problem?

And the accusation of unfairness goes in the same direction. They blame the FSF to aggressively sue software developers who don't provide the source code in their distribution, but don't sue google for benefiting from Free Software without showing their sources.

I don't really see what they want to tell me beside that the FSF is just a bunch of "extremists" who "deny the value of intellectual property rights."

I am contemplating to write them, but it's probably not worth it. What do you think?

Free Software for North Rhine-Westphalia

vie., 18 abr 2008 21:20:41 +0200

The green party in North Rhine-westphalia demands Free Software in public administration (German).

"Free Software offers great opportunities for a knowledge based society through variety, sustainability and security. The system of "open code" and "open standards" allows fair competition, precludes monopolies and ensures innovation."

The downer: the proposal uses the term Free Software only once (in the quoted sentence) and then uses "open source" perpetually.

Well, but that's maybe just my typical German side: never content and always complaining :)

Vienna's university sells GNU/Linux laptops

mié., 27 feb 2008 20:22:46 +0100

Being on the prowl for hardware vendors who meet our demands for Free Software (or at least move towards them) I found out that the university of Vienna sells laptops to their students with GNU/Linux pre-installed.

I learned that a similar project has been going on since September in Switzerland.

(the links are in German)

More mini-notebooks with GNU/Linux pre-installed to come

dom., 20 ene 2008 16:40:33 +0100

Pro-Linux led me to this blog-entry. Apparently, there are more and more notebooks, with pre-installed GNU/Linux on the way...

OpenMoko Launched as Mobile Device Company

vie., 04 ene 2008 15:29:44 +0100

Businesswire announced that OpenMoko is now a separate company of FIC. Further infos can be found here.

EeePC with Xandros available in Europe soon

vie., 30 nov 2007 00:02:11 +0100

Asus will start to offer the EeePC in Europe starting December. They seem to fulfill the GPL now after some discrepancies in the beginning.

WLAN router with Debian GNU/Linux

mar., 13 nov 2007 15:12:52 +0100

Recently, I started collecting news about hardware vendors who are favoring Free Software. Here is a new one:

WLAN routers with a free configurable Debian GNU/Linux on it can be obtained by Saxnet.

A complete list of what I've collected so far can be found on http://guido.netsons.org/free-hardware.html

ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded GNU/Linux

lun., 08 oct 2007 16:53:01 +0200

Asus built a motherboard that boots optionally a GNU/Linux system in 5 seconds. Generally, that's a nice feature, alas the system is not entirely "free" and can only be updated via Windows. See this test article and the discussion about it.

Free Burma!

jue., 04 oct 2007 00:04:11 +0200

I just read about this campaign and thought it would be a good deed to post it before I go to bed. The 4th has just begun.