Legal
Vember Audio’s Surge Plug-in Liberated Under GNU GPLv3
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 27th of September 2018 03:18:45 PM Filed under


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Surge Synth Set Free
Vember Audio tells us that, as of 21th September 2018, Surge stopped being a commerical product and became an open-source project released under the GNU GPL v3 license. They say that, for the existing users, this will allow the community to make sure that it remains compatible as plug-in standards and Operating Systems evolve and, for everyone else, it is an exiting new free synth to use, hack, port, improve or do whatever you want with.
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Vember Audio’s Surge synth plugin is now free and open-source
Reviewing Vember Audio’s Surge synth over a decade ago, we said: “This is a big, beautiful-sounding instrument. It's not cheap, but few plugins of this quality are.” Well, the sound hasn’t changed, but the price has; in fact, Surge has just been made free and open-source.
Thanks to its wavetable oscillators and FM-style algorithms, Surge is capable of creating some pretty sparkling sounds, but it also has analogue-style functions that make it suitable for producing vintage keyboard tones.
Vember Audio says that it’s been set free so that it can continue to be developed by the community and remain compatible with current standards and operating systems.
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The Software Freedom Conservancy on GPLv2 irrevocability
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 27th of September 2018 12:45:27 AM Filed under


For anybody who has been concerned by the talk from a few outsiders about revoking GPL licensing, this new section in the Software Freedom Conservancy's copyleft guide is worth a read.
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My code of conduct
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 24th of September 2018 07:27:29 PM Filed under

There are many “code of conduct” documents. Often they differ a lot. I have my own and it is probably the shortest one:
Do not be an asshole. Respect the others.
Simple. I do not care which gender people have when I speak with them (ok, may stare at your boobs or butt once) nor their sexual preferences. Colour of the skin does not matter as most of my friends I first met online without knowing anything about them. Political stuff? As long as we can be friends and do not discuss it I am fine. Etc etc.
It works on conferences. And in projects where I am/was involved.
Someone may say that part of it was shaped by working for corporation (is Red Hat corpo?) due to all those no harassment regulations and trainings. I prefer to think that it is more of how I was raised by parents, family and society.
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FOSS, standard essential patents and FRAND in the European Union
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 22nd of September 2018 08:08:15 PM Filed under

As part of the research project on “The Interaction between Open Source Software and FRAND licensing in Standardisation”, a workshop was organised by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) in collaboration with Directorate General Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CONNECT) to present and discuss the intermediate results to date. The workshop took place in Brussels on September 18, 2018. I presented a set of observations from the research on the case studies performed as part of the project that are outlined below. Other speakers where Catharina Maracke on the issue of legal compliance between Open Source and FRAND licenses, Bruce Perens on “Community Dynamics in Open Source”, and Andy Updegrove on “Dynamics in Standardisation”.
You may ask what the relevance of this debate is for the wider Free and Open Source Software community. The obvious answer is that to distribute software “without restriction”, the user needs all the usage rights associated with the program. While most FOSS contributors assume that this is naturally the central motivation for anybody to contribute in the first place, there is a long history of attempts to maintain some sort of exclusive control over a piece of FOSS code, possibly using other rights than copyright.
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The Commons Clause causes open-source disruption
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 15th of September 2018 04:42:35 AM Filed under

Redis Labs tried to legally stop cloud providers from abusing its trademark, but found it difficult because of the legal resources and budgets these giant companies have.
So the company took another route and decided to change the licenses of certain open-source Redis add-ons with the Commons Clause. This change sparked huge controversy within the community with many stating that Redis was no longer open source.
“We were the first significant company to adopt this and announce it in such a way that we got most of the heat from the community on this one,” said Bengal.
The reason for the uproar is because the Commons Clause is meant to add “restrictions” that limit or prevent the selling of open-source software to the Open Source Initiative’s approved open-source licenses.
“ … ‘Sell’ means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software. Any license notice or attribution required by the License must also include this Commons Clause License Condition notice,” the Commons Clause website states.
According to the OSI, this directly violates item six of its open-source definition in which it states no discrimination against fields of endeavor. “The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research,” the definition explains.
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Is the ‘commons clause’ a threat to open source?
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 12th of September 2018 06:06:43 PM Filed under

There are discussions on various forums regarding this clause with conflicting views. So, I will try to give my views on this.
Opposers of the clause believe a software becomes propriety on applying commons clause. This means that any service created from the original software remains the intellectual property of the original company to sell.
The fear is that this would discourage the community from contributing to open-source projects with a commons clause attached since the new products made will remain with the company. Only they will be able to monetize it if they choose to do so.
On the one hand, companies that make millions of dollars from open source software and giving anything back is not in line with the ethos of open source software. But on the other hand, smaller startups and individual contributors get penalized by this clause too.
What if small companies contribute to a large open source project and want to use the derived product for their growth? They can’t anymore if the commons clause is applied to the project they contributed to. It is also not right to think that a contributor deserves 50% of the profits if a company makes millions of dollars using their open source project.
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The Commons Clause doesn't help the commons
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 11th of September 2018 08:46:57 AM Filed under

The Commons Clause was announced recently, along with several projects moving portions of their codebase under it. It's an additional restriction intended to be applied to existing open source licenses with the effect of preventing the work from being sold[1], where the definition of being sold includes being used as a component of an online pay-for service. As described in the FAQ, this changes the effective license of the work from an open source license to a source-available license. However, the site doesn't go into a great deal of detail as to why you'd want to do that.
Fortunately one of the VCs behind this move wrote an opinion article that goes into more detail. The central argument is that Amazon make use of a great deal of open source software and integrate it into commercial products that are incredibly lucrative, but give little back to the community in return. By adopting the commons clause, Amazon will be forced to negotiate with the projects before being able to use covered versions of the software. This will, apparently, prevent behaviour that is "not conducive to sustainable open-source communities".
But this is where things get somewhat confusing.
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Microsoft-Connected Black Duck and Salil Deshpande With Their Attacks on Copyleft
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 9th of September 2018 02:28:08 PM Filed under

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The Big Legal Issue Blockchain Developers Rarely Discuss [Ed: The latest FUD from Black Duck]
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Commons Clause stops open-source abuse [Ed: Salil Deshpande trying to rationalise his attack on Free as in freedom software]
There are two key reasons to not use AGPL in this scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as a service.
First, AGPL makes it inconvenient but does not prevent cloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior described above. It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior. Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises.
Many of our portfolio companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is against their company’s policy.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU: The Commons Clause Against Copyleft, GCC/Loongson and Sustainable Computing (FSFE)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 4th of September 2018 06:33:34 AM Filed under

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A Fresh Concern About Open-Source Software
The issue came to a head last week due to two separate licensing decisions in the space. First, the database project Redis, which is known for its ability to store data in memory, announced it would use a new kind of license called “The Commons Clause,” which looks like open source (in that the source is available to use and modify) but doesn’t fully fit the standard because it allows the project to require that some commercial clients pay for use.
The problem for Redis Labs, the maker of the software, was that many cloud providers, such as Amazon, use its software but don’t contribute to its upkeep.
“Cloud providers contribute very little (if anything) to those open source projects. Instead, they use their monopolistic nature to derive hundreds of millions dollars in revenues from them,” the company wrote on its licenses page. “Already, this behavior has damaged open-source communities and put some of the companies that support them out of business.”
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Loongson 3A1000/3A2000/3A3000 Processor Support For GCC
A compiler engineer working for Loongson Technology Co is looking to land a number of improvements to these newer MIPS64 processors into the mainline GCC code-base.
Paul Hua of Loongson Tech sent out a number of patches to improve the GNU Compiler Collection's support for these Chinese MIPS64 CPUs. In particular, the six patches officially add support for the 3A1000, 3A2000, and 3A3000 series processors. Also, there is support for the older Loongson 2K1000 processor series.
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Sustainable Computing
Recent discussions about the purpose and functioning of the FSFE have led me to consider the broader picture of what I would expect Free Software and its developers and advocates to seek to achieve in wider society. It was noted, as one might expect, that as a central component of its work the FSFE seeks to uphold the legal conditions for the use of Free Software by making sure that laws and regulations do not discriminate against Free Software licensing.
This indeed keeps the activities of Free Software developers and advocates viable in the face of selfish and anticompetitive resistance to the notions of collaboration and sharing we hold dear. Advocacy for these notions is also important to let people know what is possible with technology and to be familiar with our rich technological heritage. But it turns out that these things, although rather necessary, are not sufficient for Free Software to thrive.
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Dutch government to remove legal barriers to sharing code as open source
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 1st of September 2018 07:46:56 AM Filed under

The Dutch government plans to remove legal roadblocks to allow public services to publish the source code of their ICT solutions. A pending proposal from the government to the parliament will change the country’s rules of conduct that minimise interference with the private sector. Next year, the government will begin encouraging public services to publish their source code publicly.
In recent months, the government has been working on a proposal to change itsrules of conduct. The proposal has not yet been submitted to the Dutch parliament, but the changes are anticipated in NL DIGIbeter, a brochure detailing the country’s digital agenda that was published in August. This week, a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry referred to the brochure when asked about pending changes to the rules of conduct.
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Server: HTTP Clients, IIS DDoS and 'DevOps' Hype From Red Hat
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Initially planned to ship in early 2019, the revolutionary Librem 5 mobile phone was delayed for April 2019, but now it suffered just one more delay due to the CPU choices the development team had to make to deliver a stable and reliable device that won't heat up or discharge too quickly.
Purism had to choose between the i.MX8M Quad or the i.MX8M Mini processors for their Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone, but after many trials and errors they decided to go with the i.MX8M Quad CPU as manufacturer NXP recently released a new software stack solving all previous power consumption and heating issues.
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Qt Creator 4.9 Beta released
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.9 Beta!
There are many improvements and fixes included in Qt Creator 4.9. I’ll just mention some highlights in this blog post. Please refer to our change log for a more thorough overview.
| Hack Week - Browsersync integration for Online
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Last week during the Hack Week funded by Collabora Productivity I was able to work on my own projects. It was a good opportunity for me to try to improve the process mentioned above.
I've heard previously about browsersync so I decided to try it out. It is a tool which can automatically reload used .css and .js files in all browser sessions after change detection. To make it work browsersync can start proxy server watching files on the original server and sending events to the browser clients if needed.
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