GPL is officially trustworthy

Judge Easterbrook of the US Seventh Circuit has said “GPL & open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws” when backing up a decision made by the District Court for the Southern District of Indiana when it dismissed an anti-competitive charge against IBM, Red Hat & Novell, from last December.

It’s hardly an earth-shaking decision, but it is an official statement from the litigeous USA, one which supports the Freedom of Linux and FOSS in general, and...

Instead of being a restraint on trade, the court held that the GPL serves to foster creativity, by enabling the free distribution and building of new derivative works.

...thus it places the emphasis on the Freedom in FOSS rather than getting entangled in the corporate background.

It’s nice to see decision-makers getting the main point & ignoring the distractions.

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…

I think that scores of little decisions like this will help.

12 November, 2006 07:20

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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