open...

As regular readers know, there is a struggle going on between the free software community that needs open standards to be RF (strictly sp...

As you may have gathered, the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th birthday recently, since it was publicly announced for the first time on 6 ...

The key hack that made free software possible was a legal one: using copyright to keep software free. It did that by demanding a quid pro qu...

It's easy to take things for granted – to assume that the world will always be as it is. And then sometimes you receive a mild jolt: som...

Long-suffering readers of this blog will know that the European Interoperability Framework has occupied me for some time - I wrote about the...

Last week I went along to the grandly-named Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar on Open source software: in business, in government. The good...

One of the inescapable facts of free software is that it involves a lot of law - far more than innocent hackers might expect when they settl...

As I've noted before, it's pretty well established that the GNU GPL stands up in the courts: gone are the days when detractors of co...

In the early days of free software, the struggle was just to get companies to try this new and rather unconventional approach, without worry...

Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spre...

Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new...

A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman's GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code t...

As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman's great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use cop...

One of the key thinkers in the free software world is Eben Moglen. He's been the legal brains behind the most recent iterations of the G...

Open source software is everywhere these days. In particular, Linux is being used increasingly to power embedded systems of all kinds. That&...

We all knew that Sir Tim was a total star, choosing to give away the Web rather than try to make oodles of billions from it. Some of us eve...

Here's a provocative thought : We’ve dared to suggest that the GPL as it stands today, or for that manner any other common open source l...

Richard Stallman is sometimes presented as a kind of Old Testament prophet, hurling anathemas hither and thither (indeed, I've been guil...

Contrary to some public perceptions, the Free Software Foundation is not keen on litigating against those who fail to respect the terms of t...

One of the fallback positions for purveyors of FUD is that the GNU GPL may not be valid, because it hasn't been properly tested in court...