Recently, in this column, I spoke about how we can lose our free software choices if we don’t use them. Sticking with that choice is not always easy so how do we get others to make it, particularly in a world where the choice is often made for them. How can we advocate free software in a world where others don’t seem to care?
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Help improve our Guide to DRM-free living
"Over the past eighteen months, the music industry has almost universally turned its back on Digital Restrictions Management. [...] We've just updated our Guide to DRM-free Living to reflect these developments, but we know there's a lot more that can be added. Please let us know about ..."
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UNESCO promotes use of free software in Latin America and the Caribbean
"...According to Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, who wrote an introduction article for the book, the society «needs information that is truly available to its citizens - for example, programmes that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate» ..."
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free software in free elections
"a new initiative promoted by the italian association for free software for the next italian political elections (provided that they will actually take place…). the initiative consists in asking the candidates to sign a letter where they engage themselves, in case they will be elected, to promote the use of free software through their political activity.
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Freedom
"I attended an interesting talk by James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center earlier this week. The discussion focused on how the Free Software movement can now be regarded as a success and how others are now attempting to replicate this in other areas such as media (Creative Commons).
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Free software movement, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The free software movement is a new social movement which aims to protect the rights of users to access and modify software. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project..."
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The extinction of standardization dinosaurs on the software planet
"According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). [...] What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization.
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Free as in Speech: The First Amendment, Anonymity, and the Internet
Groklaw's Pamela Jones is all too familiar with the concept of free speech and anonymity online. Jones enjoyed a brief period of anonymity when she started Groklaw, writing as “PJ” on the site, but soon her identity became a topic of speculation and controversy within the open source community. In this article, Jones answers questions about anonymity, free speech, and the Internet.
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Power of Example (and the Long View)
"... RMS: «Assuming that humanity doesn’t wipe itself out, the work we do today to produce the free educational infrastructure, the free learning resource for the world, will be useful for as long as humanity exists. If it takes 20 years to get it done, so what?
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Free Thoughts on Document Freedom Day (DFD)
Last night, I watched the film The Matrix again. It is about nine years ago when I was a middle school student that I watched it for the first time. I did not quite understand what it's talking about then, especially What is The Matrix, the question confused Neo before he back to the Real. But yesterday night, when I watched it for the second time, I quite understand.
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Free Software and Beyond: Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works
"Hello, finally. This is an unusual talk in which I'm going to start by explaining the ideas of free software, and then go on to talk about how they extend to some things other than software.
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The "idealistic" Olympic officials as an illustration to understand the difference between free software and open source...
RMS: "...Isn't it sad to see the "idealistic" Olympic officials who believe (or at least say) that sport should be kept pure of distractions such as human rights? They reminds me of the "open source" supporters that think technology should be kept pure of distractions such as human rights."
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What is Copyleft?
"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.
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The GNU GPL: Free as in Will?
As anyone who has anything to do with [non-Windows] software development knows, GNU’s definition of “free” is “free as in freedom and free as in beer.” But what dictionary did the GPL author(s) use when looking up a definition for “freedom”?
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Linux and Philosophy
Lately, I have been stumbling upon Linux users who blog about Linux whose formal training involved Philosophy.
So what is fundamentally strange about people who have similar backgrounds or profiles so to speak?
Maybe nothing or maybe everything. Is it normal to find people who have the same formal educational background who share the same passion - such as writing about Linux?
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