60614707
submission
TuringTest writes:
Popular culture website Wikia originally hosted its user-contributed content under a free, sharealike Commercial Commons license (CC-BY-SA). At least as soon as 2003, some specific wikis decided to use the non-commercial CC-BY-NC license instead: hey, this license supposedly protects the authors, and anyone is free to choose how they want to license their work anyway, right?
However, in late 2012 Wikia added to its License terms of service a retroactive clause for all its non-commercial content, granting Wikia an exclusive right to use this content in commercial contexts, effectively making all CC-BY-NC content dual-licensed. And today, Wikia is publicizing a partnership with Sony to display Wikia content on Smart TVs, a clear commercial use.
A similar event happened at TV Tropes when the site owners single-handedly changed the site's copyright notice from ShareAlike to the incompatible NonCommercial, without notifying nor requesting consent from its contributors. Is this the ultimate fate of all wikis? Do Creative Commons licenses hold any weight for community websites?
60093491
submission
TuringTest writes:
In the beginning, pop culture wiki TV Tropes licensed its content with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license for free content.
When Google pulled away its AdSense revenue because of... let's call it NSFW fan fiction, TV Tropes changed its guidelines to forbid tropes about mature content. In response to this move, two forks were eventually created. The admins disliked this move so much that they relicensed all content to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike version, despite their site not having requested copyright rights from their users. Only later they added a clause to their Terms of use page requiring all contributors to grant the site irrevocable, exclusive ownership of their edits.
Has it ever happened to you that you released free content, and someone changed its license and pretend that it was theirs?
18190984
submission
TuringTest writes:
A comission of the Spanish Congress has rejected a law that allowed the closure of web sites that provide no authorized downloads. The government couldn't reach enough support from its allies not because those opposed the law in principle but because of the way it was redacted and the lack of negotiation. Recently the Spanish Senate rejected a law on net neutrality. Also the Wikileaks cables disclosed pressure from the USA to the Spanish government to pass a law to reduce Internet sharing of music and media, which is legal in Spain.
12205840
submission
TuringTest writes:
BumpTop, a company providing a multi-touch physical desktop metaphor has been acquired by Google and made "no longer be available for sale". BumpTop provides a direct way to handle information through simple gestures. Some media see this acquisition as a movement by Google to position against the iPad. Will BumpTop be ported to Android?
7958828
submission
TuringTest writes:
NG Evangelion meets Pocahontas, in space!
Oh, and nonsense plot. They could have a biologic neural net granting FRIKKIN INMORTALITY and they settled for the flying stone???
5841591
submission
TuringTest writes:
(Found via OStatic).
European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably in a similar way than its current TomTom Map Share technology in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2.
Does it make OpenLR a GPL GPS?
2109713
submission
TuringTest writes:
I was surprised to learn that Chandler, the open-source Personal Information Manager (covered on Slashdot after releasing some stable versions), has silently reached its 1.0 milestone this summer only to (or maybe because of) having its financial support removed at the end of 2008. Chandler inherits organization concepts from Lotus Agenda and is a brainchild of Mitch Kapor (of Firefox, EFF and Lotus fame). It shares an approach to unified information representation with recent PIMs like MIT's Haystack and KDE's
Nepomuk. What happened to the persistent universal data storage that object-oriented desktops and metadata filesystems were never able to provide? Did it finally arrive as a userland application, and nobody cared?
824265
submission
TuringTest writes:
With the controversy over the recent release of OpenGL 3.0, people is debating wether OpenGL is dead or it isn't. In this situation, a new low-level library called Gallium3D promises to ease development and refactoring of drivers for OpenGL (or any other 3D API) by acting as an efficient middleware between the API and the metal. Gallium3D seems to be gaining traction within the community with talks at several FOSS conferences (e.g. FOSDEM and aKademy).
822237
submission
TuringTest writes:
In an attempt to bring the Wii closer to the hardcore gamers taste, Sega is preparing to releaseMadWorld, a violent 'hack and slash' game. This has brought attention from family-conscious lobbies: "The decision to release a violent game on a console which has based its reputation on family fun has shocked anti-violence pressure groups. Mediawatch-UK, Britains longest running pressure group campaigning for decency in TV, films and games, said MadWorld will 'spoil' the Wii."
The game features black & white cel-shaded graphics, except for the blood blobs wich are in brilliant red.
MadWorld is announced to be released in early 2009.
560114
submission
TuringTest writes:
The code for ENSO, a keyboard-based command launcher in the line of Mac OS' Quicksilver, has been released under the revised BSD license. ENSO can be explained as an expanded application launcher that aims to combine the power of a command line interface integrated within a desktop GUI. Its design is inspired by the ideas of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. It currently allows to invoke arbitrary commands such as launching applications, universal spell-checking, translation and web search from any text field, google-maps integration, remote control, and search-based task switching. ENSO is programmed in Python. Thanks to being open sourced, this Windows native application is currently being ported to Mac and Linux.
560112
submission
TuringTest writes:
The code for ENSO, a keyboard-based command launcher in the line of Mac OS' Quicksilver, has been released under the revised BSD license. ENSO can be explained as an expanded application launcher that aims to combine the power of a command line interface integrated within a desktop GUI. It currently allows to invoke arbitrary commands such as launching applications, universal spell-checking, translation and web search from any text field, google-maps integration, remote control, and search-based task switching. ENSO is programmed in Python. Thanks to being open sourced, this Windows native application is currently being ported to Mac and Linux.
398333
submission
TuringTest writes:
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, of international fame, recently sued the city of Bilbao (Spain) for violation of intellectual property after his Zubizuri bridge was modified by the city council to add a new footbridge on its side. Now a judge has sentenced against Calatrava saying that public right prevails over intellectual property. Altough the ruling acknowledges that the building design has intellectual property, it also concludes that a bridge is to walk on it. (Beware, some links are in Spanish. Translate at your own risk.)
44246
submission
TuringTest writes:
Jensen Harris, the Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, blogs about Microsoft's recent licensing agreement to share its new inteface IP:
"Today, we're announcing a licensing program for the 2007 Microsoft
Office system user interface which allows virtually anyone to obtain a
royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product,
including the Ribbon, galleries, the Mini Toolbar, and the rest of the
user interface." (see the press release). Is there any precedent for this? Can Microsoft actually require
licensing of the UI? Is it enforceable? Is this a good precedent?
