Showing headlines posted by Libervis

This months column is a loose commentary on the most impacting of the recent events, the european rejection of software patents, the G8 summit in relation to the "make poverty history" campaign and terrorism, in the sad spirit of the recent London bombing. This month was a month of a great victory as well as a great loss, but you're not left powerless about it.

This paper aims to show that the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) model is suitable not only to make good software. It might also work in other economic areas. Making a parallel with the collective FOSS property, the possibility and viability of a collective ownership over the knowledge of production is analyzed. The ideas here presented were born and developed in a FOSS community (Libervis) and written in its Wiki section.

"Humanity has made so much movies about threats from space, and yet, space is calm and friendly to us while the biggest threat comes from those who are threatened - human beings!"

Yet another month has passed, full of events, screaming thoughts and voices, virtual fights, victories and defeats. But the "war" is still raging. And this column is on the "computing liberty front", with small people like you and me...

Some breaking news "leaked" into the libervis blog by Charles Schulz from OpenOffice.org LANG Confederation saying that "Sun would put its JRE (not Java!) under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL)" This well goes with another news story published by SapInfo.net, on this page saying that "Sun Microsystems intends to make Java Enterprise System available as an open source product that will define the company as truly committed to open source, according to a report."

In the mean time, I would also like to remind a very important point on the licensing scheme: although a jre has to be used to run some features, OpenOffice.org 2.0 is STILL FREE SOFTWARE and complies with free software ideals and legal requirements. Java is a separate software platform that doesn't belong to OOo itself, and is only used to run some selected features. Of course, what I, and apparently many others, find cumbersome is that this list of features tends to grow rather than to diminish.

The idea is to *compute* our computing liberties as they were the past month time and as they are now. This means that we will review and comment major free software related events happening last month and their impact on our computing freedoms, that is, mainly our software freedoms.

I was glancing through the headlines at CNET news today, and I was surprised to see an article by RMS, the president of the FSF. What makes this surprising is that CNET always seems to have a vaguely pro-m$ agenda. I read through the article, and my surprise diminished.