Free Software, Education, Open Data and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 13, 2026

• [Old] Casey Muratori ☛ Why Software Patents are Bad, Period.

  That’s the reality of patents. Patents are not about protecting intellectual property from theft — that is an almost negligible part of the law. What patents actually are is a right for people who file them to sue other people for damages, regardless of whether or not any actual theft took place. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at how damages are awarded in patent trials: regular damages are assessed if the court concludes the patent was infringed, but triple damages are assessed if it turns out the infringer knew about the patent.

• Education

  • MWL ☛ OpenZFS Mastery Status

    Sponsors have received a copy of the draft for their perusal and review. I’m also interested in feedback from OpenZFS experts.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler news: GNU Taler in the Chat

    More information about the work (including the code of the forks) can be found here. [...]

    A. Lenkenhoff has started work on a fork of the GNU Taler wallets to make them easier to integrate into Chat clients like Signal or Mattermost. We think this is a great idea, and will be reviewing the patches and hopefully find a way to support this in the mainline GNU Taler wallets in the future. A key limitation is that Signal also needed to be forked, but we hope that Signal will equally review the patches and consider including them in their signed releases.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Copyleft: the backfiring monkey patch

    Now that we’ve lost the “downhill battle”, it seems in hindsight that the monkey-patch called copyleft built a worse world. Do not misread me as saying proprietary software is okay in any way, shape, form, mold, or incarnation. The veneer-layer of proprietary software is one of the sets of prison bars that are holding the badness of the world together.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Jerry Tuttle ☛ Distribution of race by ZCTA

      The U.S. Census Bureau publishes decennial population by city, and also by these smaller ZCTAs, but never by actual USPS zipcodes. (They do publish other statistics by zipcode.)

      A ZCTA polygon is unlikely to perfectly match the geographical area of the dominant zipcode. Moreover, a ZCTA may actually cross a municipal boundary. For example, ZCTA 11001 (Floral Park) and 11040 (New Hyde Park) span both Queens (NYC) and Nassau Counties, but most of their area and population are in Nassau County. So counting population in such ZCTAs in full for NYC would overstate NYC's population. Adding the populations of all the NYC ZCTAs is not going to equal the population of NYC.

    • Giles Dickenson-Jones ☛ The rule of law and economic growth: what three decades of data show

      Weighted by population, the rule of law has slipped globally since 1996. India and the United States contributed a large part to this decline, while China’s net impact was negligible thanks to a recovery from the mid 00’s. Countries with a stronger rule of law tend to be wealthier, and those where it improved were more likely to grow faster, but there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, with China experiencing higher growth than might be expected from changes in its rule of law score, alongside Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guyana and Myanmar.*