Today, the Ger­man Coro­na-Warn-App was released as Open Source Soft­ware. You may know it as CWA. The jour­nal­ists most­ly received it pos­i­tive­ly, even those of Spiegel and Welt. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment want­ed to release it as open-source soft­ware. That should increase the accep­tance of the app by the Ger­man peo­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is still some skep­ti­cism. Let me com­ment on some of these con­cerns: […]

This arti­cle talks about some side effects. It explains why it is a bit sub­op­ti­mal to dis­trib­ute Lily­Pond snip­pets under the terms of the GPL. Even, if one loves to cre­ate, share, and/or use free and open-source soft­ware. And believe me, I do so. The side effect is sim­ple. Includ­ing GPL-licensed Lily­Pond snip­pets enforce you to dis­trib­ute your own work under the terms of the GPL: […]

IoT gad­gets often only offer inter­faces that do not allow inspect­ing or mod­i­fy­ing their soft­ware. YOCTO tries to build spe­cif­ic soft­ware for IOT gad­gets. And the GPLv3 requires that GPLv3-licensed soft­ware must be replace­able. Thus, YOCTO, IOT, and the GPLv3 are in a clinch, if YOCTO wants to be a dis­tri­b­u­tion for IOT devices that do not come with an update inter­face. And we might ask, how YOCTO deals with this con­tra­dic­tion? […]

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, the JINZ Licens­ing fails: The license is ‘strange’. And by this, the author final­ly vio­lates the GPL. A para­mount exam­ple: […]