Software newsforge

What are you looking for? Preferences Community Newsletters Log Out. A few interesting nuggets: "Basically Microsoft is going to use the legal system to shut down open source software, and for all of its cleverness, the GPL makes it fairly easy unless a white knight steps in.

My Profile Log Out. Join Discussion for: HP memo forecasts Microsoft attacks on free Add Your Comment. Yes, I know the FAQ claims otherwise, but the proof is in the pudding. As another example, it clearly tries to be a copyleft by requiring that derived works be distributed under the same license , but copyleft licenses are notoriously subtle to get right to avoid loopholes and unintended consequences and I don't think this one succeeds.

I strongly urge that the SIL authors to take advantage of the available expertise in order to revise or replace the license. Just because the FSF says it is a free-software license something I do not contest doesn't mean it is a well-crafted license.

The FSF considers lots of licenses "free" that they don't particularly recommend. I do see Jim Gettys posting expressing concern about "license proliferation" and suggesting that they should get input from Eben Moglen of the FSF.

I see Gervase Markham of Mozilla. The FontForge link is someone pointing it out as an example of a license designed for fonts, with no particular analysis of whether it is a well-crafted license or not. Besides, random developers are notoriously bad at evaluating licenses You really need to get competent legal counsel, experienced in free software, involved in such a thing.

I can see the need for a good free font license, but this is not a task for amateurs. We actually submitted the license to many experts in the community including Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen and Bruce Perens. We are in touch with Debian and Ubuntu people and are discussing the license with debian-legal. The discussion with the community is by no means stopping. No license is ever perfect. The Open Font License 1. Of course, there will always be those who prefer criticizing If everything is so obvious to you, then we'd love to see your suggestions and advice in helping improve future versions of the license.

Either 1 BSV came to all the distros without an italicized font or 2 I'm living under a rock when it comes to configuring and setting up my X11 Fonts configuration to make BSV fonts italicized. I believe that in an effort to increase both visibility, and revenue, vendor will begin to partner with different Linux distribution.

The only real concern would be if apps wanted kernel patches for which the source was not open, but that isn't what I see. For now the impact is all in the important and legitimate butt-covering area. It is clearly cheaper for a developer house to just support, say, Red Hat 9 on x But as the previous poster said, it looks just like collective butt-covering.

Most of the extras are actually the same things on most distributions, albeit maybe not things installed by default. User: Password:. And how would you qualify software people that think with their feeble grasp of current IP law they'll be better able to make use of a prior art database than the patent sharks out there?

Sure they can build it. Just like an engineer can design a better gun than the model current swat team use. Does it mean that once the better gun is built and on the market the engineer has a fighting chance against swat people? User: Password:. Prior art won't solve the software patent problem NewsForge. McKenney my opinions, not necessarily those of my employer Log in to post comments.

And please do read 4,, for an example of the wiggling possible. Your comments lead me to believe that you have not yet done so, or perhaps have not yet thought carefully about the implications. Your swat-team metaphor applies to patent reform just as surely as it does to things like prior-art databases.