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Free Software News and Advancements

Fri, 2006-08-11 17:42 — Uwe Hermann

No, I'm not dead, just very very busy...

There have been quite a few interesting new Free Software projects and news popping up recently (or I only recently noticed them):

The GPLv3 is back in the news: Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3. Very interesting read!
Ditto for the next-generation Creative Commons licenses: Creative Commons Version 3.0 - Public Discussion Launched. See also Evan Prodromou's Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report.
On to more practical things: I have put quite some time into trying out and working on LinuxBIOS, a free replacement of traditional, closed-source, proprietary BIOSes. More details on that later... If you want to check it out, and/or help (patches are always welcome), have a look at the wiki or the mailing list.
The Call for nominations for the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software has been posted. Who do you think should get the award this year?
Intel has released Free Software drivers (2D and 3D!) for their Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The code is licensed partly under the MIT license, partly the GPL. Thanks Intel!
Apple has released some more code as Free Software: Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd. Thanks Apple! They switched from the APSL 2.0 to the Apache license 2.0 (at least for some of the code), not sure why. They're both considered "Open Source", and both are GPL-incompatible.
GNU Classpath 0.92 "Bling! Bling!" has been released, with full support for 2D graphics. One step closer to a free Java environment (not that I would recommend anybody to write stuff in Java if you have a choice)...