Posts about Licensing

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.

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.

For 6 years, the Bitkom Open Source Guide 2.0 was a wel­come first point of con­tact for Ger­man com­pa­nies regard­ing the appro­pri­ate use of open-source soft­ware. It was a stim­u­lat­ing source and bench­mark at the same time. But like every­thing else in the world, it has aged over time. Thus, it’s good to know that […]

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, […]

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 […]

Today, the Ger­man Coro­­na-Warn-App was released. It was received pos­i­tive­ly, even at Spiegel and Welt. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment want­ed it to be devel­oped as open-source soft­ware for increas­ing 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 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.

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?

. Cur­rent­ly I am review­ing music soft­ware, as for exam­ple JNIZ. It allows “[…] to build and to har­mo­nize sev­er­al voic­es accord­ing to the rules of clas­si­cal har­mo­ny.” [1] Although it is host­ed on Source­Forge, its license is ‘strange’. And by this, the author final­ly vio­lates the GPL. A para­mount exam­ple: