News about Free Software, the GNU project and GNU applications

 GPL 3.0 Beckons Open-Source Community, Dec 02, 2005

The Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center on Wednesday released the road map for the long-awaited revision of the GNU General Public License.

Users will be free to comment on the upcoming complex and technical draft versions of the GNU General Public License 3.0 in an easy way, according to Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation.

African free software developers have released early versions of a free hospital pharmacy management system. The developers that initiated the project were part of a three week-long developer workshop at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) recently.

The next version of the General Public License may tackle the issue of Web companies that use free software in commercial Web-based applications but don't distribute the source code.

In a recent interview, ESR shocked a lot of people when he said, "We don't need the GPL anymore." Federico Biancuzzi recently contacted RMS to talk about the past, the present, and the future of the GNU GPL. Among other things, they discussed the new clauses of the upcoming GPL version 3.

Why aren't there more women involved in technology? Back in July, when we wrote about David Wheeler's account of his trip to Brazil's 6th International Free Software Conference (FISL 6.0), he specifically mentioned meeting Fernanda G. Weiden there and how successful she has been in getting women there involved. I contacted her and asked if she'd be willing to explain to us why she thinks there are so few women in software development and what can be done to improve the numbers. What is her secret?

The first draft of the next version of the General Public License should be released for public comments in early 2006, according to a key player in the effort to modernize the foundation of the free and open-source programming movements.

The royalty-free license under which Microsoft plans to make its upcoming new Office Open XML Formats widely available is incompatible with the GNU General Public License and will thus prevent many free and open-source software projects from using the formats, community officials say.

Eben Moglen is convinced the software industry is returning to being about a free exchange of ideas and code.

Richard Stallman, one of the main forces behind the GNU/Linux operating system and the free software movement, is in Taiwan fighting on a new front -- to get the island's PC makers to release source code for their drivers.

Programmers are working to debug and speed performance of the newly released GCC 4.0, the compiler at the foundation of the open-source and free-software movements.

For the first time in my life, I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software.

"We need a free BIOS, because if we don't control the BIOS we don't control our computers," said Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation

RMS kindly agreed to be interviewed again by OFB's Timothy R. Butler on what he is up to, where the Foundation's popular GPL license is heading and his perspective concerning various changes in the GNU/Linux community since his last interview here.

Since taking office two years ago, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has turned Brazil into a tropical outpost of the free software movement.

The director of MIT's Media Lab has recommended that Brazil install open-source software on thousands of computers that will be sold to the poor, saying proprietary software programs like ones offered by Microsoft Corp. may be less attractive.

The entire realm of open-source software could get a performance boost if all goes well with a plan to overhaul a crucial programming tool called GCC.

The FSF is proposing that users get involved in the campaign by purchasing motherboards that support a free BIOS, buying AMD CPUs rather than Intel, and writing letters to hardware vendors.

The founder of the OpenBSD and Open SSH projects, Theo de Raadt, has been presented the Free Software Foundation's 2004 award for the advancement of free software.

Mr. Gates' secret is out now--he too was a "communist;" he, too, recognized that software patents were harmful--until Microsoft became one of these giants.

We began this interview via email, but later had to finish by telephone after Richard Stallman fell and broke his arm. He was kind enough to speak with me at length, discussing his first contact with computers, his time in the AI lab, the current state of the GNU Hurd, his current role in the Free Software Foundation, the problems with non-free software, and much more. The following words offer much insight into how we got here, and what challenges we still face.

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