Tag: open source

  • Are companies people? For free/open-source licensing purposes? Should they be?

    Free and open-source software is great. For example, large companies gain the following freedom: “The freedom to distribute copies [to some other large corporation for free] so your large corporation can help your neighbor large corporation”. Governments have this freedom: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to other governments. By doing this […]

  • We need open-source firmware

    Kapersky reports that hackers in the “Equation Group” (see Ars Technica coverage) infiltrated the firmware of most major hard drive manufacturers:  rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers … on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived […]

  • We Want Root

    When you buy an iPhone, do you actually get to own it? Apple is doing its darnedest to make changes impossibe that you might want to do but that they don’t approve of, even after you paid a lot of money for the device. Does not sound like ownership to me. It wasn’t always that […]

  • Reframing the Open-Source vs. Proprietary Software Licensing Debate

    Much ink has been spilled on open-source vs. proprietary licensing, and in the end, it’s a clash of civilizations: one whose goal it is to better humanity by making valuable technology freely available, vs. one whose members must return more money to their investors than they had to pay to the developers creating the software. […]