Free Software Magazine – By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects. What would things in the free software world look like if the courts had decided otherwise? For one thing, the implementation of copyleft would have to be completely different. [...] read more

Scientechie – My last review of openSUSE 11.0 generated mixed comments, but one of the recurring themes was disapproval of my recommendation because SUSE is the “enemy” of Linux, simply because it struck a “deal” with Microsoft.
I am no expert in legal matters, but from what I can find, it seems that Novell legitimized Microsoft’s claim on [...] read more

Cyber Cynic – I like Linux. I like Red Hat and Fedora Linux. I use them every day. What I don’t like, though, is not knowing what’s what with the recent security break-in into the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora file servers. [...] read more