Tag archive: source

Mere hours after the Wall Street Journal unveiled its own version of WikiLeaks, a service called SafeHouse that allows whistleblowers to submit sensitive news to the newspaper's reporters, researchers say that the “secure” service is anything but, reports Forbes. SafeHouse invites readers to share information relevant to “fraud, abuse, pollution, insider trading, and other harms,” and says it offers them the ability… Read More

Relations between the open source movement—particularly the communities behind various distributions of Linux—and software giant Microsoft have always been contentious. On one hand, Microsoft claims to be embracing open source development efforts and working to integrate and support open source tools in its own commercial products and applications…on the other hand, for years Microsoft has claimed Linux infringes on… Read More

The British government has said that open source software will be adopted for public services "when it delivers best value for money," and that public services should avoid being “locked into proprietary software,” according to the BBC. The move could reportedly save the government $900 million a year, and is part of a wave of open source moves by governments around the globe, said Simon Phipps, chief open source… Read More

You might never have given a thought to copyright on open source software. After all, anyone can use it, right? Well yes, but as a federal appeals court ruled yesterday, that’s no reason it shouldn’t qualify for the copyright protection known as Artistic License. It all revolves around a case involving model railroads. Yes, model railroads. Robert Jacobsen, who manages open source software group Java Model Railroad Interface,… Read More

Networking device maker Xterasys has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the developers of BusyBox, which alleged the company was violating the terms of BusyBox's GPL open source licensing by failing to distribute source code along with their BusyBox-enabled products. Under the settlement, Xterasys will stop distributing BusyBox until the Software Freedom Law Center (which handled the suit on behalf of the BusyBox developers)… Read More

In what may turn out to be an important legal precedent for the open software movement, the Software Freedom Law Center has filed the first U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit over violation of the terms of the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The SFLC's clients? Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, the developers of BusyBox, an application which implements several Unix-like utilities for use in embedded systems. The lawsuit's… Read More

In an interview with Fortune magazine (available online via the CNN Web site) Microsoft's VP of intellectual property Horacio Gutierrez and Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith make the bold assertion that free and open source software (FOSS)—including the Linux operating system—violate some 245 Microsoft patents, and the company believes open source distributors and end users should pay royalties on the… Read More

“While this leak – which has not yet been confirmed by Valve – is by no means as serious as previous incidents which saw the source code for the engine and an incomplete early build of the game itself finding their way online, the manner in which it happened will undoubtedly cause red faces at the company. Reports indicate that the developer actually distributed the script over the Steam distribution network by accident,… Read More

Development studio Valve Software has seen the entire source code to Half-Life 2 – including source from some of the company's middleware partners – leaked to the Internet following a breach in the company's security. The source code bundle includes none of the game's artwork or levels; however, the entire source code for the game itself, its graphics engine and the Havok physics engine, Miles sound system and… Read More

Computer Weekly 360 has an interesting article which talks about the business that is open source software. How do companies actually make money by giving away free software? For those of you not familiar with open source software, the code is usually free for download and use. Even the license under which this code is distributed, either by general public license (GPL) or GNU license can permit you to use the software for commercial… Read More