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 Skype Gives Up Anti-GPL Appeal: Legal Posted by: comforteagle
From the FTW dept.:
...In the end, the court hinted twice that if it was to judge about the case, Skype would not have very high chances. After a short break, Skype decided to revoke their appeals case and accept the previous judgement of the lower court (Landgericht Muenchen I, the decision was in my favor) as the final judgement. This means that the previous court decision is legally binding to Skype, and we have successfully won what has probably been the most lengthy and time consuming case so far.
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GPL vs. Skype Back In Court: Legal Posted by: comforteagle
From the Enforcement dept.:
Tomorrow at 10:30am at the Oberlandesgericht Muenchen (higher regional court of Munich) there will be an oral hearing in the "Welte vs. Skype Technologies SA" case. The hearing is to be held in room E.06.
This case is about a GPL violation of Skype, related to their sales of Wifi Skype phones based on the Linux operating system kernel.
I'm fighting as part of the gpl-violations.org project in enforcing the GPL against Skype since February 2007. Initially Skype didn't respond, we then applied for a preliminary injunction. That injunction was granted by the court in June 2007, but Skype chose to file an appeals case against it.
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Moz Firefox Shipped Malware Attached to Extention: Security Posted by: comforteagle
From the Knowing is Better Than Not dept.:
The Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 contains inserted code to load remote content. This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself. This usually results in the user seeing unwanted ads, but may be used for more malicious actions.
Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy. While we cannot determine the exact number of compromised downloads, there have been 16,667 total downloads of the Vietnamese language pack since November 2007, so we anticipate the impact on users to be limited.
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Harvard Law votes Yes on open access: Information Posted by: comforteagle
From the The Right Kind dept.:
The faculty of Harvard Law School has unanimously approved a motion for open access: articles will be made freely available in an online repository. With the success of this motion, Harvard Law becomes the first law school to make an institutional commitment to open access to its faculty's scholarly publications.
The Berkman community is tremendously excited by the news, which resonates deeply with the Center's mission and helps set the stage for other academic institutions to establish open access policies. In February, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences did just that, unanimously passing an open access motion spearheaded by computer science professor and Berkman faculty co-director Stuart Shieber. (In addition, Harvard College Free Culture has launched a free Thesis Repository!) Professor Shieber's work and leadership, along with that of Harvard library director Robert Darnton, paved the way for Berkman's own Terry Fisher and John Palfrey to bring this open access proposal to the Law School.
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FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge: Information Posted by: comforteagle
From the The Wrong Kind of Open Access dept.:
The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.
"The free flow of information is at the heart of every library's work. That's why Congress passed a law limiting the FBI's power to issue NSLs to America's libraries," said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. "While it's never easy standing up to the government -- particularly when I was barred from discussing it with anyone -- I knew I had to challenge something that was clearly wrong. I'm grateful that I am able now to talk about what happened to me, so that other libraries can learn how they can fight back from these overreaching demands."
Note: Way to go, EFF!
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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta: Open Source Posted by: comforteagle
From the Oh! OOo dept.:
The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new "Start Centre", new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.
Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).
OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces partial VBA support to this platform. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.
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Google Starts OS Security Group: Security Posted by: comforteagle
From the Help from Above dept.:
Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software.
oCERT, short for the open source computer emergency response team, will aim to remediate security vulnerabilities and exploits in a wide range of open source programs by coordinating communication among publishers. According to Google's security blog, the group "will strive to contact software authors with all security reports and aid in debugging and patching, especially in cases where the author, or the reporter, doesn't have a background in security."
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MySQL Server Staying Open Source, even Backup extensions: Databases Posted by: comforteagle
From the Reversing a Dumb Idea dept.:
As reported yesterday from CommunityOne:
* MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
* so will the MySQL Connectors, and
* so will the main storage engines we ship.
In addition:
* MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source,
* the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
* the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,
where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.
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Sun ships OpenSolaris: Open Source Posted by: comforteagle
From the New Toy! dept.:
A mere three years after starting the OpenSolaris project, Sun Microsystems today releases the first official OpenSolaris version. OpenSolaris includes the all-important Project Indiana, a project from Debian founder Ian Murdock to make OpenSolaris’ package management system more like that of Linux. OpenSolaris is based on the original Solaris kernel but includes features such as the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) which offers a range of tools including instant rollback and checks to prevent data corruption.
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Java SE 6 For Mac OS X: Java Posted by: comforteagle
From the 6 dept.:
After a long delay, Apple has finally released a version of Java 6 for OS X. 64-bit Intel Macs are starting to see this pushed out via Software Update...
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