Latest From FSF and Various Attacks on Software Freedom
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FSF
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, January 17, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 17 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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[Repeat] FSF ☛ Anchoring the FSF in its values
We, the founders of the FSF, started the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985, with the moral goal of giving users control over their computing, what we call software freedom -- and specifically to support developing the GNU operating system that would make software freedom a practical possibility. The crucial first significant decision we five founders faced was how the new organization would be governed so as to protect its goal and principles.
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Licensing / Legal
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Seth Godin ☛ The magic of the commons
Software patents are tempting (I have two, neither of which rewarded the investors who filed the patents) but they almost never pay off. Like a hit song, software does better when more people are part of it. And it’s more likely that people will participate in software that’s resilient, inspectable, connected and always improving. The hard part might not be the idea–it’s in creating the conditions for others to participate.
Open source software is the backbone of the [Internet] (it’s powering many of the sites you visit, including this one, and is behind most of the tools you use, including email and Wikipedia). But there’s always been a relentless, profit-driven push to fence it in.
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Splinter Groups
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The Register UK ☛ Software Freedom Conservancy celebrates LGPL court win
But the source code AVM provided in response to his request was incomplete – it lacked the scripts necessary to compile and install modified libraries on the router. And that capability is necessary, the complaint argues, in order to give users the ability to change how their devices function.
So Steck took the matter to court to enforce his rights under the LGPL. And several months after the lawsuit was filed, AVM fully provided the requested source code. Meanwhile, the litigation continued. On June 24, 2024, the court in Berlin found in Steck's favor, awarding €7,500 (~$7,725) in legal expenses. No order to provide the installation scripts was necessary as AVM has already done so.
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The copyright monopoly conundrum in artificial intelligence age [Ed: The Microsoft-occupied or Microsoft-controlled OSI (or "Microsoft OSI" for short) is at it again. The Microsoft front group OSI pushes the usual "generative Hey Hi (AI)" PR that Microsoft pays for]
The rise of generative Hey Hi (AI) tools has reignited longstanding debates about copyright monopoly law, ownership, and innovation.
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Mozilla
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Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: This month in Servo: dark mode, keyword sizes, XPath, and more! [Ed: "Linux" Foundation seems to have outsourced more of Mozilla to Microsoft and to proprietary software prison]
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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Kev Quirk ☛ Aligning Automattic’s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
Judging by the amount of companies and services Automattic is buying up, WordPress is doing all right - it's certainly not "just a single company" that benefits from WordPress.
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The Verge ☛ Automattic cuts WordPress contribution hours, blames WP Engine
Now, instead of spending 3,988 hours per week developing the WordPress project, Automattic says it will now contribute around 45 hours as part of Five for the Future — a program that encourages companies to give back five percent of their resources to WordPress.org. “These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates,” Automattic says.
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Security
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LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium and mingw-poppler), Red Hat (dpdk, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (firefox, govulncheck-vulndb, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, libmfx, openjpeg2, python310, python312, python39, tomcat, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (golang-golang-x-net).
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