Liberal Licensing: FRAND Not Compatible, FOSDEM Talk and 3-D Printing
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FOSS vs FRAND is a collision of worldviews
Of late there have been a number of interventions sponsored by the world’s largest and most profitable tech patent holders to muddy the waters about open source and FRAND licensing of patents in standards by arguing contentious minutiae like the intent of the authors of the BSD license. This is happening because of the clash of industries I wrote about in 2016, with companies fundamentally based on extracting patent royalties unable to imagine any other way of doing business so mistaking the issue of FRAND as being about license compliance rather than as it being an obstacle to the very purpose of open source in commercial software — collaboration with others.
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Motivations and pitfalls for new "open-source" licenses
One of the bigger developments of the last year has been the introduction of licenses that purport to address perceived shortcomings in existing free and open-source software licenses. Much has been said and written about them, some of it here, and they are clearly much on the community's mind. At FOSDEM 2019, Michael Cheng gave his view on the motivations for the introduction of these licenses, whether they've been effective in addressing those motivations, what unintended consequences they may also have had, and the need for the community to develop some ground rules about them going forward.
In the past year we have seen several unusual new licenses, the Server Side Public License (SSPL), the Commons Clause license addendum, the CockroachDB Community License, and the Confluent Community License among them. All either perturb the historical copyleft norm of "you must distribute derivative works under the same license" by extending the scope past what's covered under the definition of a derivative work, or they exclude some historically permitted form of activity such as building similar works or making money. These developments have been of concern to many; talks at FOSDEM and the immediately-following Copyleft Conference with titles like "Redis Labs and the tragedy of the Commons Clause", "Who wants you to think nobody uses the AGPL and why", and "What is the maximum permissible scope for copyleft?" leave little room to doubt how many people are mulling over them.
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Ender 3: Open Source 3D Printer Reviewed By A 3D Printing Noob
3D printing has been all the rage lately with both professionals and prosumers accomplishing incredible things from printing patient organs for surgery practice to printing robotic arms and quad-copters. As with all things, there has been a trickle-down effect that’s led to even the most inexperienced being able to obtain this revolutionary technology.
Here we will explore my adventure from having never touched a 3D printer to assembling and operating my own Creality Ender 3.
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