Compliance Programming
17. May 2023 / 17. May 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
To speed up deliverability, JavaScript libraries — embedded in a website — are usually compressed by deleting all whitespace, line feeds, and comments. They are minified. As a result, they usually contain only very rudimentary license information — at least not the license text itself. But all FOSS licenses require us to ship some compliance […]
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Compliance export Programming Tooling
21. April 2023 / 29. April 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
Often the website operator is told, that Data protection is complex and has to be organized by experts. But what if she doesn’t have the money for that? If it seems somehow nonsensical to shoot at a sparrow blog with the cannon of a paid team of experts? Then — maybe and with the help […]
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Compliance Tooling
2. March 2023 / 29. March 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
I love ZEN presentations. For that, you need pictures. Many pictures. Good pictures. Fortunately, it is technically easy to integrate photos from the internet into your own site. What is challenging, however, is to do it legally.
1. March 2023 / 9. March 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
I don’t buy images. Never. I take my own pictures. Or I use free images released under a Creative Commons License. Or in the ‘public domain’. Some image databases offer their photographs under their own licenses, equivalent to the free licenses, as long as I do not make their images publicly available through another image […]
Compliance
7. February 2023 / 18. April 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
In the European legal area, exploitation rights inherently belong to the author of a work. She does not have to do anything else. In the American legal area, things are different. There, every work falls into the ‘public domain’ by default. Only when the author actively claims her ‘copyright’, the work belongs to her.
Compliance Programming Tooling
4. February 2023 / 29. March 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
What is important is in the eye of the beholder. A lawyer would perhaps include the imprint, the image credits, or the data protection concept. And not to forget: the open source compliance artifacts. The reader, on the other hand, would see it differently! She wants content. Entertainment. Real ‘content’. Not this legal gobbledygook.
11. July 2022 / 15. May 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
For 6 years, the Bitkom Open Source Guide 2.0 was a tutorial for the appropriate use of open-source software. It was a benchmark for German companies. But it has aged over time, naturally. Good that Bitkom and its ‘Open Source’ working group have taken up the topic again: In June 2022, there was officially released […]
26. February 2022 / 25. January 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
A presentation without images sucks. Therefore, we are sometimes tempted to take some from the Internet for beautifying our work. There are so many excellent pictures on the World Wide Web. But to legally inserting a foreign picture in one’s own presentation is not that easy. Unfortunately, a new type of troll has emerged recently, […]
28. November 2020 / 25. January 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
By releasing the Open Source License Compendium and the Open Source Compliance Advisor, Deutsche Telekom has already supported the task to deal with Open Source Compliance. But DT offers so many and complex Open Source based products that it is too expensive to create the necessary Open Source compliance artifacts manually. Thus, DT needs a […]
29. October 2019 / 25. January 2023 by Karsten Reincke | 2 Comments on LilyPond, LilyPond Snippets and the GPL: About some bad side effects.
This article explains why it is a bit suboptimal to distribute LilyPond snippets under the terms of the GPL, even if one — as I do — loves to create, to share and/or to use free and open-source software.
30. June 2019 / 25. January 2023 by Karsten Reincke | 1 Comment on YOCTO, IoT, and the GPLv3
IoT gadgets often only offer interfaces which do not allow to inspect or to modify their software. YOCTO tries to build specific software of IOT gadgets. And the GPLv3 requires that GPLv3 licensed software must be replaceable. So, we might ask, how YOCTO deals with this contradiction?
17. February 2019 / 17. May 2023 by Karsten Reincke | Leave a Comment
Currently, I am reviewing music software, for example, JNIZ. It allows “[…] to build and to harmonize several voices according to the rules of classical harmony.” Although it is hosted on SourceForge, its license is ‘strange’. And by this, the author finally violates the GPL. A paramount example: Let’s start with the JNIZ license it […]