freedom

Michael Tiemann confirms a Forrester report that suggests that freedom, not cost, is what is driving CIOs to open source. This may be true, but my experience is that it's usually cost that first opens the door to open source. It's hard to beat getting something for nothing.

At any rate, "freedom" defined by CIOs is a little different from "freedom" defined by Richard Stallman:… Read more

It seems that most of the world's open source-related lawsuits emerge from Utah, for whatever reason. First there was Caldera vs. Microsoft (which, of course, didn't have anything to do with open source, but for Caldera's inclusion). Then there was SCO. Somewhere along the way there was Linksys, which didn't have anything more to do with Utah than that I used to visit its offices, and I'm from Utah.

And now we have BusyBox (through the Software Freedom Law Center) suing Monsoon Multimedia, with BusyBox's project founder, Erik Andersen, a former colleague of mine … Read more

Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.

Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.

The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.

Why?… Read more

Update: I updated this posting to correct my misunderstanding of an ambiguous point in the news release--the ar5k-based OpenBSD driver isn't proprietary.

The Software Freedom Law Center, which provides free legal advice to free and open-source software projects, has declared an open-source project to support Atheros Communications wireless network devices to be free of copyright infringement.

The group--which employs notable attorney and former Free Software Foundation counsel Eben Moglen--performed a confidential comparison of the OpenHAL project and the Atheros HAL software whose functions it attempts to duplicate, the center said Tuesday. The audit was a response to allegations of … Read more

As Steven Vaughan-Nichols is reporting, the Software Freedom Law Center is offering a free day of open-source legal education from the best in the business. Let's put it this way: if you get any opportunity to hear Eben Moglen speak, you take it. Especially when admission to the event is free.

The Summit will have two parts: a closed session in the morning for a private meeting of some of the world's foremost FOSS attorneys, and an open session in the afternoon consisting of free legal presentations to the public.… Read more

MONTREAL -- Remember the fable about the scorpion and the frog? The scorpion can't help himself from stinging the frog: "I could not help myself. It is my nature."

Keep that in mind when reading a new 400-page government report from the National Research Council, which is called "Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age" and has been in the works for seven years. Its availability was announced on Friday afternoon here at the 2007 Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference.

If this sounds a little tedious, you're right, but NRC reports tend … Read more

MONTREAL -- Florida's decision this week to dump touch-screen voting machines is a good start, computer scientists said at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here on Friday.

The controversial ATM-like machines, which have been plagued by reports of bugs and vulnerabilities, will be replaced with optical-scan balloting, accorfding to a Florida legislature vote this week.

A panel of respected computer scientists -- including Peter Neumann of SRI International, Barbara Simons of the Association of Computing Machinery, and Ron Rivest of MIT (the "R" in the RSA algorithm) -- painted a dismal picture of the current state … Read more

MONTREAL -- The theme of this year's Computers Freedom and Privacy conference here is autonomy, and an unexpected subtext were left-of-center activists fretting about whether data-mining will let online businesses charge customers different prices.

Usually this is expressed as: Will Amazon.com charge me more for certain products based on what it knows as my purchasing history?

In September 2000, reports said that Amazon.com was offering the same DVDs to different customers at discounts of 30, 35 or 40 percent. Amazon said it was a random price test, but after criticism, it decided to refund the difference to … Read more

MONTREAL -- Ontario government employees will no longer be able to visit Facebook and YouTube at work.

Premier Dalton McGuinty said Thursday that he couldn't see the justification for permitting employees to continue to access the sites. They're now banned like gambling and porn sites.

There is some justification for taking this step, of course. Ontario government workers (it's the country's most populous province, so there are a lot of them) can waste lots of time checking their Facebook accounts and browsing video clips on YouTube. Cracking down on time-wasting by bureaucrats paid for by tax … Read more