by Florian Idelberger

The topic of license incompatibility, either between different free and open-source licenses or free and open-source licenses and proprietary licenses, especially in the context of Linux kernel modules has been a recurring topic, (not only) on ifross.org. This was for example a topic for this  ifross news about NVIDIA’s practices in making kernel modules with binary blobs work with the kernel, while trying not to fall under the copyleft clause of the GPL. These discussions continued, also among user as can be seen for example from the NVIDIA developer forums and in other cases.

Recently, there is more discussion again prompted by built-in support for ZFS for Linux (http://zfsonlinux.org) in Ubuntu’s next release 16.04 LTS (as already present in testing versions) and the question whether this infringes upon usage and distribution rights of the Linux Kernel as published under the GPL v2 or those portions of ZFS for Linux originally written for Solaris and published under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) as originally released by Sun Microsystems, now with copyright held by Oracle. » Weiter

by Florian Idelberger

This August, (but published only recently) the District Court in Columbia had to decide  on the interpretation and proper use of the CC-BY-SA 2.0 license, a Creative Commons license that requires attribution and publications of derivative works under the same license. The court regarded the license as effective on all accounts, in particular on the question of proper attribution as well as what constitutes a derivative work. Due to its specifics this case can be enlightening for non-professional users. » Weiter

Von: Dennis G. Jansen, LL.M. (Berkeley)

Ende April fand an der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in München eine Tagung zum Einsatz von offenen Lizenzen in den Geisteswissenschaften statt. Inzwischen sind die Materialien der Vorträge online verfügbar. Bei den Materialien befindet sich neben einer kurzen Zusammenfassung der Beiträge und den Präsentationsfolien auch meist ein Videomitschnitt. Beiträge gab es zu den Themenbereichen: » Weiter

Von: Lisa Käde

On June 22nd 2015 the European Commission announced that the source code of a prototype of LEOS, an open source application for editing legal texts, was going to be made available soon. Now, the source code is available for download on on Joinup, the European Commission’s collaboration platform for ICT solutions. The most recent version was made available on July 27th. » Weiter