Facebook officially launched the Facebook Open Platform yesterday, but the question everyone is asking now is, “CPAL? What’s that?.” Matt Asay calls it a poison pill. The Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) is based on the Mozilla Public License, but with two notable changes. First, the “ASP loophole” has been […]
Free Software
97 posts
TechCrunch has been covering the breaking news: Facebook is planning to release the infrastructure between the Facebook Platform as free software! Facebook, I knew you had it in you. Many older folks in the tech crowd view Facebook with much suspicion, if not considering it outright evil or Microsoft-like in […]
Last month, George Farris began a thread on the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list questioning the license choice of Ubuntu training material. The training manuals are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is non-free because it doesn’t allow commercial use. George asks, “why on earth would you not allow educational […]
I’ve been eager to transition my music library from the proprietary patent-ridden MP3 format to Ogg Vorbis, and since my iPod died a few months back, I’ve decided to make the move. I’ve read up on Ogg Vorbis and learned that it’s best to re-rip my CDs, since converting from […]
((If you’re tagged in this note on Facebook, it’s because I value your opinion and am interested to hear what you have to say. Or because I’m pretending to value your opinion and would be interested in proving you wrong. 😉 Either way, you may want to read the first […]
The other day, I wrote a (ridiculously long) post announcing my commitment to free culture, and more specifically, to free music. I didn’t expect anyone to read the entire thing, but my friend, John, not only read it but also responded to it on Facebook. I’m not sure what his […]
My mom (who runs Ubuntu 7.10) was having trouble with old PowerPoint presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress. Her machine would grind to a halt in presentation mode and she was forced to export the presentations as PDFs in order to deliver them. I investigated the issues and found some help in […]
I have a ThinkPad T61 (646562U – with Intel GM965 integrated graphics) and I run Ubuntu 7.10 as my main operating system. When I wake from a suspend, my screen is too dark to use. I figured my laptop, which is relatively new, isn’t supported properly yet and just refrained […]
Language is important. It shapes our view, our thinking. It’s necessary for our expression and understanding. It’s important to pay attention to the terms we choose. The commonly used phrase “intellectual property rights” is loaded and problematic. Intellectual property rights: Ambiguous; it lumps copyright, patent and trademark law all under […]