Collaborate Disseminate
For companies that build equipment like CNC machines or lasercutters, it’s tempting to use open-source software in a lot of areas. After all, it’s stable, featureful, and has typically passed …read more Continue reading Watch Out For Lasercutter Manufacturers Violating GPL
Renegotiating and consolidating software contracts might seem like a low-value administrative activity, but there could be millions of dollars in annual savings with minimal impact on end users.
The post Finding meaningful savings in software licensing… Continue reading Finding meaningful savings in software licensing renegotiations
When we last checked in on the Audacity community, privacy-minded users of the free and open source audio editor were concerned over proposed plans to add telemetry reporting to the …read more Continue reading Muse Group Continues Tone Deaf Handling of Audacity
A default password would let anyone access the Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem Base platform, even if it’s not directly connected to the internet. Continue reading Critical Cisco Bug Opens Software Licencing Manager to Remote Attack
At this point, you’ve almost certainly heard the tale of Eric Lundgren, the electronics recycler who is now looking at spending 15 months in prison because he was duplicating freely available Windows restore discs. Of no use to anyone who doesn’t already have a licensed copy of Windows, these restore discs have little to no monetary value. In fact, as an individual, you couldn’t buy one at retail if you wanted to. The duplication of these discs would therefore seem to be a victimless crime.
Especially when you hear what Eric wanted to do with these discs. To help extend …read more
Continue reading The Eric Lundgren Story: When Free isn’t Free
Years ago, while the GPLv3 was still being drafted, I got a chance to attend a presentation by Richard Stallman. He did his whole routine as St IGNUcius, and then at the end said he would be answering questions in a separate room off to the side. While the more causal nerds shuffled out of the presentation room, I went along with a small group of free software aficionados that followed our patron saint into the inner sanctum.
When my turn came to address the free software maestro, I asked what advantages the GPLv3 would have to a lowly hacker …read more
We’re used to the relationship between the commercial software companies from whom we’ve bought whichever of the programs we use on our computers, and ourselves as end users. We pay them money, and they give us a licence to use the software. We then go away and do our work on it, create our Microsoft Word documents or whatever, and those are our work, to do whatever we want with.
There are plenty of arguments against this arrangement from the world of free software, indeed many of us choose to heed them and run open source alternatives to the paid-for …read more
Continue reading Will Your CAD Software Company Own Your Files, Too?
