18267720
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of "a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power". There have been a number of Russian projects to roll out free software, notably in the educational sector, but none so far has really taken off. With the backing of Putin, could this be the breakthrough free software has been waiting for?
18109600
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
After two years of leaks, the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) version 2 has been published [.pdf] — and it's a disaster for free software. Where EIF version 1 specified that patents in open standards should be "made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis", we now have "FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software." Of course, that doesn't say *which* open source licence, and conveniently allows the GNU GPL to be excluded by terms that are incompatible with it. So the lobbyists won: I can't wait for Wikileaks or the new Brussels Leaks to tell us what happened behind the scenes when EIF v2 was being drawn up.
17586354
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
That's what Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia, seems to think. Quoted in the context of continuing questions about Russia's plans to create its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux, Pryanishnikov said [via Google Translate]: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?
17489972
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
Today is a doubly-special day for the world of computing: on 12 November 1937, "Alan Turing’s paper entitled "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" appeared"; while on 12 November 1990, another historic text appeared, which began: "The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project." Perhaps we should be marking this in some way: how about establishing a world-wide Web Day on this date?
17432112
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
Alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron's surprise announcement that he wanted to make UK copyright law "fit for the internet age" was a comment from David Willetts, the UK science and universities minister, who said: "The US rule is that 'anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent'. That's something we do wish to investigate." Unfortunately, he seems to be under the impression that Google built its success through being "able to patent some work", when in fact, Google has relatively few patents compared to other companies like Microsoft, say. Is the UK about to suffer problems of overburdened examiners approving too many weak patents that then lead to patent thickets and spiralling levels of litigation, as has happened in the US? What would you say to discourage him from taking this step?