Free Software

Today I had a long and very positive meeting about software patents and the NZ Patents Bill with Commerce Committee chairperson, Labour party's Lianne Dalziel, as well as Drupal-peers Dave Lane and Jonathan Hunt.  Dalziel, Christchurch East MP, was well-informed about the Patents Bill, the Ministry of Economic Development's Patent Review and the insufficient attention paid to software patents (thanks to our emails and exchange of documents beforehand).  She was not so well-informed about software patents and the harm that they cause – as would be expected given the complexity and obscurity of these issues for those who do not work in the software development.

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NZ government is about to pass a new Patents Act.  In the 8-year review, they seemingly forgot to consider the impacts of patents on computer software!  Submissions on the bill are being accepted till 2 July, so we need to move fast.  Make a submission now! 

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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed its first-ever copyright infringement lawsuit, accusing networking giant Cisco of refusing to distribute GPL’d source code embedded as firmware or used in router products sold under Cisco’s “Linkys” brand. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the FSF claims Cisco's Linksys routers violate terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, and the GNU Lesser General Public License.

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What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO. Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are deployed by community technology centers around the globe providing access to the internet, and all the information, data and resources that come with it. The Free Software (while having $0 in licensing costs) also reduces the cost of hardware, and allows programmers to improve upon it, and share their improvements without fear.

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit -- the leading intellectual property court in the US -- has delivered a major victory to the Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) movement by explicitly holding, for the first time, that FOSS licensors are entitled to copyright infringement relief.

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Ethan just sent an email out to the CivicActions team about an upcoming training in using OpenOffice, the Free software desktop office suite that most of us use.

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Without a doubt, the most productive time in getting through my inbox is when I'm on an airplane, sans Internet access. This week I'm exploring Freedom to help me accomplish the same result. Essentially, Freedom disables all wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to 3 hours at a time. After the time is up, Freedom will re-enable your network adapters and display a confirmation that you're back online. If you absolutely need to pull the cord and MUST get back online, just restart your computer to reset. Let me restate that: just stopping or quitting the Freedom application will not re-enable your network adapters - and yes, this is purposeful! Freedom is a program designed to help you get things done, away from the distractions of network connectivity. http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/

Dries wrote on his blog recently that the Software Freedom Law Center will assist the Drupal Project on various licensing issues.

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This list is one of the most comprehensive directories of the FOSS replacements for commercial software: Use FOSS and Live Free! (as in speech, not beer)

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