CivicActions

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.

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.

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.

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)

Two months ago, we were honored to be considered (along with Development Seed), as one of the two finalists to take on a series of sprints for the development of the new Amnesty International site. In late May, we were informed that we had been awarded the engagement. Two weeks ago in London, Ken Jordan, Jacob Singh, and I met with the Amnesty team for a 2 day engagement kick-off. We are on track to present the results of our first sprint in early July.

I´ll be traveling for a bit, and I thought it may be interesting to explain how to work remotely without having to carry your laptop.

According to Todd Bishop of Seattle PI, who broke the story, SUSE vouchers have no expiration date. Groklaw claims that this legal oversight looks to be the wooden stake in the Novell-Micorosoft patent peace agreement. Groklaw quotes Eben Moglen:

CEO Jonathan Schwartz, of Sun Microsystems, recently announced the company will participate more fully in the Mac OS X version of the NeoOffice free and open-source (FOSS) software project.

Edward Peterlin, Chief Visionary of NeoOffice.org, has sent an open letter to Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz regarding Sun's announcement:

A new article on ZDNet says that Microsoft is claiming that free and open-source software violates more than 230 of its patents.

Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs.