6429823
submission
svonkie writes:
Two prominent IP lawyers have warned that the all-pervasive General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is legally unsound. They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software. "If you go back in time to when GPLv2 was written, I don't think people were aware of just how ubiquitous this license would become and how closely scrutinized it would be," said Mark Radcliffe, partner at the firm DLA Piper and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "At that time, open source was not something as broadly used as it is now." Radcliffe was joined by Karen Copenhaver, partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and counsel for the Linux Foundation, for a GPL web conference hosted by the license-sniffing firm Black Duck software
3564245
submission
svonkie writes:
Despite launching on the T-Mobile G1 with little mainstream fanfare, Google Inc.'s Android OS appears to have gained strong interest in the open source development community, reports Computerworld Canada. According to a survey of Black Duck Software's Knowledge Base, Apple Inc.'s iPhone led the industry with 266 open source project releases during 2008, while Android followed in second place with 191 releases. Black Duck compiled the data after scouring through over 185,000 of open source projects across 4,000 Internet sites.
3152993
submission
svonkie writes:
C overwhelmingly proved the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent.
In scripting, JavaScript came top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl on 18 per cent.
PHP attracted just 11 per cent and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many.
590082
submission
Svonkie writes:
Brendan Koerner reports in Wired Magazine that a growing number of ventures are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system.
5251
submission
svonkie writes:
About 2.6 million current and former Circuit City credit card account holders are being notified by credit card vendor Chase Card Services that five computer data tapes containing their personal information were mistakenly identified as trash and thrown away by Chase personnel in July, according to Computerworld.
