The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today that it has published an initial set of criteria for endorsing computers and other devices. The FSF seeks both to obtain feedback on the criteria, and raise interest in the program among hardware manufacturers. Ultimately, the FSF plans to promote an endorsement mark to be carried on products that meet the criteria: respects your freedom.

"We’ve just added the seal you see at right to Creative Commons licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. Public domain is not a license, but is an acceptable copyright status for free cultural works according to the Definition.

"The Open Source Initiative has announced that the OSI Board has approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) as satisfying the criteria of the Open Source Definition, following their submission in August..."

In the last 24 hours I implemented Licenses validation, whitelisting, masking and database support to Entropy. When I started, I tried to find out if someone (maybe crazy like me?) had already made a list of free (as in freedom and/or beer) software licenses. I didn’t dig too much and decided to have a look at /usr/portage/licenses. OMG, 811 licenses to read!

Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative (and Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs), has decided to stand up against the flagrant abuse of the term "open source" (by companies like SugarCRM, CentricCRM, and MuleSource, and OpenBravo, to shame a few). He is urging the community to use "open source" only to refer to OSI-approved licenses.

After my positive experience of Debian it was time to move on and this time I chose Slackware 12 to try out. I didn't know anything about Slackware going into it and I certainly didn't know what I was getting myself into, "fools rush in" as they say. I certainly did. Slackware was an effort to say the least, I spent a couple of days with it. So, here's what happened on my Slackware adventure...

Sound in Wine has been a big issue. From a user’s perspective, it didn’t work well. From a technical user’s perspective, there were 3 different drivers to choose from and none of them worked well. From a developer’s perspective, no sound driver would ever work well.

"The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules."

The head of the open-source group that will decide whether to certify Microsoft Corp.'s "shared source" software licenses as open-source licenses said that more than half of Redmond's licenses appear to automatically fail the group's rules.