Posts about Licensing

A Picture Please! But where to take from, if not steal?
/ | Leave a CommentI 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.
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Feeding the Footer III: Your Copyright Line
/ | Leave a CommentIn 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.
Read more »The Bitkom Open Source Guide 3.0: A Comprehensive Upgrade
/ | Leave a CommentFor 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 […]
Read more »CC-BY Trolls
/ | Leave a CommentA 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, […]
Read more »TDOSCA & OSCake: Automating FOSS Compliance
/ | Leave a CommentBy 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 […]
Read more »The German Corona Warn App as Open Source Software
/ | Leave a CommentToday, 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:
Read more »LilyPond, LilyPond Snippets and the GPL: About some bad side effects.
/ | 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.
Read more »YOCTO, IoT, and the GPLv3
/ | 1 Comment on YOCTO, IoT, and the GPLv3IoT 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?
Read more »JNIZ — or how a licensing fails
/ | Leave a Comment. 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:
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