Once upon a time I was going to be a lawyer. One reason I didn’t go that way was to avoid running down rabbit holes like the one our own Jason Perlow offered us Thursday. (This puzzle called Down the Rabbit Hole is now on sale over at Legendary Toys.) Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t ...

Continuing its effort to get by with a little help from its friends, Nokia released a new version of its Qt user interface framework and Qt Creator, an integrated development environment (IDE). The new software is offered under the Lesser GPL for the first time, as well as the main GPL and two comme...

Friend of the blog Erica Zeidenberg, who represents the good folks at Palamida, has been flogging an “open source job hunters toolkit,” filled with open source programs you can use, free, in your job hunt. (This classic photo from the last Great Depression was done for the WPA by John E....

Der heutige Download-Tipp, das Game Frozen Bubble, kommt von mir. Die Beschreibung entnehme ich mal Wikipedia. Eine bessere wollte mir nicht gelingen. Bei dem Spiel geht es um das möglichst sinnvolle Zuordnen von gegebenen Bällen verschiedener Farben zu einer Vielzahl anderer Bälle. Die Ballwurfm...

Looks like the spirit of bipartisan cooperation in D.C. has already left its mark on the PC. Last night, we’re told, Microsoft worked together with Novell-sponsored Mono Project and Moonlight team to enable Linux desktop users to view the inauguration events using the open source implementatio...

A few theme designers — including yours truly — received an email from Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s boss, yesterday. It read (in full and unedited): Thanks for emailing me about the theme directory. The other day I noticed a ton of bad stuff had snuck in like lots of spammy SEO lin...

Here's a nice opportunity for everyone to learn more about coreboot, a Free Software / Open Source firmware/BIOS for x86 PCs. Ron Minnich, founder of the LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) project, Peter Stuge of Stuge Konsult, and Stefan Reinauer of coresystems GmbH have given a presentation for the G...

I have been wracking my brain all day for an angle on this Apple-Psystar story (great work by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) and I can’t come up with one. Save this. Open source should be supporting Apple here. Think about it. What is at the heart of open source? Contracts. The BSD and GPL licenses a...

Are pure open source principles, by themselves, enough to lend a start-up traction in the market? Identi.ca hopes so. The Montreal-based start-up  is offering the micro-blogging functionality of Twitter under the Affero GPL license. The software also responds to something called the Open Microblog...

The GPL violation cases known collectively as the BusyBox cases never went to court, but they do seem to have settled the question of whether the license is enforceable. It is. So why is Edward Walsh, an attorney at Wolf Greenfield in Boston, trying to claim this shows “new risks in the irrec...