Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project

How a mailing list question in 2020 led me to spend years simplifying PHP's licensing to plain BSD-3-Clause.

org - Official Codeberg Documents and their unofficial translations.

This essay argues that developers of open source software / Free Software should use an existing widely-used license compatible with the General Public License (GPL). It also argues against FLOSS license proliferation.

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

Eleven months before the U.S. declared war on Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone.” He articulated four …

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I've written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA's aren't necessary, and on Conservancy's typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.

The purpose of this inclusion policy is to ensure that all applications included in the main F-Droid repository support F-Droid’s core mission: providing a t...

The purpose of this inclusion policy is to ensure that all applications included in the main F-Droid repository support F-Droid’s core mission: providing a t...

Cheese from twolofbees.com attempts to make sense of the stats that have come out of the Humble Bundle promotions, with some additional comments from top Humble Bundle contributors.

Creative Commons provides a range of licenses, each of which grants different rights to use the materials licensed under them. All of these licenses offer more permissions than “all rights reserved.” To help show more clearly what the different CC licenses let people do, CC marks the most permissive of its licenses as “Approved for…

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun's control of the code) of the anti-license-proliferation community's urging, Oracle continues to license their code under their own, GPL-incompatible license. While this violation has many facets, and Oracle did not themselves violate GPL in this specific case, they hold the keys to this particular kingdom and they forbid the Linux community to enter. While there are complexities that we must address, in this context, Oracle could make everyone's life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Nevertheless, until they do, since GPL-incompatible licenses are the root of all GPL violations, combinations of GPL'd code with Oracle's GPL-incompatible code yield GPL violations, such as the ongoing violation by Canonical, Ltd.

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

Currently, in a default installation of Debian with the GNOME desktop, Bluetooth headphones that require the AAC codec1 cannot be used. As the Debian wiki outlines, using the AAC codec over Bluetooth, while technically supported by PipeWire, is explicitly disabled in Debian at this time. This is because the fdk-aac library needed to enable this support is currently in the non-free component of the repository, meaning that PipeWire, which is in the main component, cannot depend on it. Such as, for example, any Apple AirPods, which only support AAC AFAICT. ↩

JSHint is a tool that helps to detect errors and potential problems in your JavaScript code - jshint/jshint

So I’m in the shift from writing-as-braindump notes to actual dissertation manuscript. I’m writing basically in reverse chronological order, because

EDIT: As of 2013-10, I've started an Observium fork called LibreNMS. This is just here for historical reference. I recently started...

Personal webpage of Alexandre Dulaunoy - from information security to open source and art

An almost comprehensive guide about what kind of licenses to choose when creating a new open-source project: MIT or Apache 2.0 or BSD

Let me start by saying this... I hate the GPL. Oh yeah, and a heads up, I am just a software engineer, and not a lawyer. Having said that....

Ein Freund von mir hat die Domain gutesoftware.de, aber keinen Inhalt dafür. Es hat mich gestört, dass das Potenzial einer so schönen Domain nicht genutzt wird. Also habe ich mich damit beschäftigt, w

sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.

a blog about software development, technology and other stuff

The principles of Free Software are simple but it is important to not get confused by the underlying complexity caused by its long history. Learn about the...

The meaning of ‘source code’ for non-software works with specific emphasis on fonts, hyphenation patterns, game data and software documentation.

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