Free/Open Source Software Leftovers
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Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation
There are ways that you can influence how others use your FOSS software, mainly having to do with making sure that everyone else keeps this same promise. You cannot stop someone from making money from your software, but you can obligate them to share their improvements with everyone else, which you can incorporate back into the original product to make it more compelling for everyone. The GPL family of licenses is designed for this purpose.1
Furthermore, if your business is a consumer of free and open source software, rather than a producer, you need to be aware that you may be subject to those obligations. It’s not a free lunch: you may be required to return your improvements to the community. FOSS licenses are important, and you should make it your business to understand them, both as a user, contributor, and author of free and open source software.
FOSS is eating the world, and it’s a very attractive choice for businesses for a good reason. This is the reason. It increases wealth for everyone. Capitalism concerns itself with making monopolies — FOSS instead concerns itself with the socialized creation of software wealth.
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People of WordPress: Thelma Mutete – WordPress.org
From a young age Thelma was encouraged by her father to ‘work hard, and dream big’. In High School, she pursued a career in Computer Science. She said: “I did not know what I would be doing or how I would get there but I just knew that I was going to pursue a career in information technology.”
She wrote her first line of code at the age of 16 living in Zimbabwe, Africa. This was to mark the beginning of her enthusiasm for computer programming.
When she joined the school’s computer class, Thelma thought she would learn Excel and Word. Instead, the assignment was to write her first program in C. She said: “It was not easy, but it was very exciting. l remember writing up simple code for a Video Club – a check-in/out for VHS tapes and CDs. Thus began my fascination with computers.”
Seven years later, she went on to university to study for a Bachelors in Business Management and Information Technology. Her third year internship was at a local web design and hosting company. Though she had hoped her placement would be at a local bank or telecommunications company, the chance to discover website design turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
In 2017, Thelma went on to work for a company designing websites using HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and Joomla. She had heard about WordPress but had not used it. She recalls: “People have this misconception that WordPress is not for real developers and it is not secure and at that time I was one of those people.”
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Google forcing users to Chrome after appearance of Edge
ANALYSIS Google's recent move to limit the use of its APIs in Chrome, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, appears to be driven by the launch of Microsoft's Edge browser based on the open-source version of Chrome, known as Chromium.
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A license change for Nmap
It may be kind of an obvious statement, but licensing terms matter in our communities. Even a misplaced word or three can be fatal for a license, which is part of the motivation for the efforts to reduce license proliferation in free-software projects. Over the last few months, various distribution projects have been discussing changes made to the license for the Nmap network scanner; those changes seemed to be adding restrictions that would make the software non-free, though that was not the intent. But the incident does serve to show the importance of license clarity.
On October 3, Nmap 7.90 was released; it came with a new license, the Nmap Public Source License (NPSL) version 0.92. The link here goes to the Wayback Machine as the usual location for the NPSL was updated to version 0.93 in mid-January. Previous versions of Nmap were available under the GPLv2, with some additional wording with regard to the project's definition of a "derivative work".
As part of the release announcement and changelog for Nmap 7.90, the license change was made openly: "Upgraded the Nmap license [from] a sort of hacked-up version of GPLv2 to a cleaner and better organized version (still based on GPLv2) now called the Nmap Public Source License to avoid confusion." It did not take long for distributions to start noticing and reacting to the change.
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Linux Foundation's Joshipura: Disaggregation is at the heart of open source, cloud-native and edge
While disaggregation's roots in the telecom industry are deeper than shiny new concepts such as cloud-native and ORAN, it's foundational to open source and those new technologies, according to the Linux Foundation's Aprit Joshipura.
During a Wednesday keynote address for FierceTelecom Winter Blitz Week, Joshipura defined disaggregation as the separation of hardware and software, as well as the separation of horizontal layers of software.
Network disaggregation is "kind of old news," he said.
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