FSF - Microsoft cannot declare itself exempt from the requirements of GPLv3
That’s just not the way licensing works. And Microsloths legal department knows this. Idiots.
Samba Team Asks Novell to Reconsider
Samba Team Asks Novell to Reconsider
The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd.
One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.
The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their “commercial” versus “non-commercial” status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else.
The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions.
Furthermore, the GPL makes it clear that all distributors of GPL’d software must stand together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell over their competitors.
For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community. We are, in essence, their suppliers, and Novell should know that they have no right to make self serving deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community.
Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community.
And if they don’t back out of this deal with the devil then they need to be fourced to quit bundling software that uses the GPL with their distro.
gNewSense Official Website | Main / gNewSense
Interesting sounding new distro. Just downloaded it and am gonna give it a spin.
Just finished downloading BigDaddy 0.93a and am burning it to cd now. Have a new computer with XP home just itching to be removed from it that I am gonna use in place with this one. Not quite state of the art but at 1.5 ghz is better than the 1 ghz that the one I am now on. The new one has 512 mb memory so will upgrade that a bit. Also has a built in dvd burner. May have to add a cd burner, will see if the dvd will also do the cds first though. 80 gb hard drive. Onboard video though also has a video card slot. May move my present card depending on how it does.
Just finished burning and is checking now. Closer and closer to bye-bye XP. 
The home to the GNU version (to be) of FireFox named IceWeasel.  Nothing here yet but a bit of text and some source code links but with Mozilla getting sh*tty about the logo and name this is the way to go. Hope this works out.
Google Code - Updates: Announcing Tesseract OCR
Good show Google! Â Now for the community to get this sucker ready for prime time.
Make PDFs for free under the GPL | Free Software Magazine
Now that the new versions of Ghostscript are available under the free software GPL license other projects relying on Ghostscript can be fully GPL software as well. One of these projects, PDFCreator, I recently tested and I must admit I’m impressed.
PDFCreator allows you to make a PDF of anything you can print, documents, spreadsheet, presentations, anything with a print function. PDFCreator even has encryption and security features that would make it perfect for a corporate environment.
Glad to see this. Have in the past fought for hours trying to get a pdf to work right. Will have to check it out.
