In what seems to be a new and much welcomed trend towards true openness, Microsoft announced yesterday they were opening up the source code of .NET under a Free Software License. And they weren’t kidding: the code for .NET can already be found at their GitHub repository.
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Aaron Swartz was a brilliant computer programmer and activist who helped develop the RSS news feed protocol, co-founded Reddit, developed the web.py framework, and helped shape the Creative Commons licensing system. At fourteen he was authoring documents for the World Wide Web Consortium. At fifteen he was working alongside the likes of Tim Berners-Lee and…
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Always on the look out for new resources, we came upon the Internet Archive’s Book Images account on Flickr. The account contains well over 2 million images in the public domain, that is, pictures with copyrights that have elapsed or were deliberately placed in the public domain to start with. Some are weird, obscure and…
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A new restrictive copyright legislation, ready to be passed into law in Spain, may very well hinder the interchange of ideas and render all Creative Commons and other copyleft licenses useless. Known as the “Google Tax”, the law establishes that news aggregation sites (such as Google News, Menéame, Reddit, Digg, and others) should pay a…
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Or why copyright law so often sucks. If you caught Nick Park’s “The Wrong Trousers”, a claymotion adventure with Wallace and Gromit and one evil penguin, when it was first shown on TV you may have noticed that when Gromit opens his card at the breakfast table, it plays “Happy Birthday to You”, which is…
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