gnu

Brainteasers can be both fun and useful, helping you develop your problem-solving skills and memory while also providing hours of addictive entertainment. Gbrainy is a basic program that contains a variety of different mental challenges, effectively helping you pass time and sharpen your mind. It's not the most attractive program we've ever seen, but it's not bad for what it is.

Gbrainy's interface is plain, especially for a game; there is a handful of colored buttons across the top, but the rest of the interface is pretty drab. User can choose between four different types of … Read more

News of the weird: Remi Denis-Courmont, one of the developers of the VLC Media Player app, has apparently sent Apple a "formal notification of copyright infringement" and asked that the app be removed from the App Store.

Yes, we have apparently crossed over into Bizarro World.

In the old days, it was Apple that did the app yanking, usually for obscure or arbitrary reasons. In recent months, however, the company has lifted--or at least loosened--many of its previous restrictions. Prior to that, it's unlikely the VLC Media Player would have been allowed in the first place.

As … Read more

The GPL version 2 has been in decline for some time, and has just dipped below a 50 percent adoption rate among open-source projects, according to new data released by Black Duck Software.

While some of this decline may be due to GPL version 3's increased adoption, at least some may derive from growing commercial interest in Apache-style licensing.

One of the best indications of this shift is Red Hat's decision to license the JBoss HornetQ project under an Apache license, rather than the Lesser General Public License, to which it had previously defaulted.

Having said that, it'… Read more

In July 2007, version 3 of the GNU General Public License barely accounted for 164 projects. A year later, the number had climbed past 2,000 total projects. Today, as announced by Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona, the number of open-source projects licensed under GPLv3 is at least 56,000.

And that's just counting the projects hosted at Google Code.

In a hallway conversation with DiBona at OSCON, he told me roughly half of all projects on Google Code use the GPL and, of those, roughly half have moved to GPLv3, or 25 percent of all Google … Read more

If most developers contribute to open-source projects because they want to, rather than because they're forced to, why do we have the GNU General Public License?

That's the question that hit me last night as I tried to sleep in the shadow of Richard Stallman's MIT. Stallman, of course, originated the GPL, a brilliant way to turn copyright on its head in order to force software to remain open.

But in the process, did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?

I'm not trying to be cute here. Think about it. If you … Read more

The GNU General Public License (GPL) used to dominate open-source licensing, but its hold appears to be slipping according to new research from Black Duck Software. While GPLv3 has seen a 400-percent increase in adoption, and though the GPL and its variants still claim over 65 percent of all open-source projects, Black Duck reports a 5 percent decline in GPL adoption.

This drop makes sense, given the GPL's decreasing relevance to the modern world of network-delivered software and the increasing value of data over software.

ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn points out that there are no clear replacements arising for … Read more

GNU project founder Richard Stallman has called on developers to pull back from Mono, arguing that increasing use of the open-source toolset could prompt legal action by Microsoft.

Mono is a .Net-compatible set of tools designed to allow applications based on Microsoft's C# programming language to run on platforms including Linux, BSD, Unix, Mac OS X, and Solaris. A number of popular open-source applications, such as the note application Tomboy and the photo manager F-Spot, depend on Mono to run. As a result, Linux distributions such as Debian have said they are considering including Mono in the operating system'… Read more

The launch of Apple's iPhone 3G S has justifiably caught the media's attention, what with its elegant design and speedy performance. But for all the noise that Apple is making in mobile, open source--not Apple--may well be doing the most to define the future of mobile communications, as two leading open-source projects suggest.

No, I'm not talking about the Palm Pre, with its Linux-based operating system and its new open-source applications portal. Nor am I referring to Google Android.

Rather, I'm referring to the InSTEDD project, which The Economist recently highlighted, as well as GNU Radio, … Read more

GIMP Portable provides users with several tools for touching up and altering photos. Users who are able to overcome its hectic and disjointed layout will discover a serviceable, though uninspiring, program.

Users will be immediately confused and frustrated by this program's interface. Where most photo retouching programs have all the tools on one screen, this program opens three separate screens: one for the photo and two for toolboxes. Fortunately, once users organize the boxes to their liking, they will find a generous amount of flexibility with the tools. Users who remain confused can leaf through the online Help manual … Read more