Acer remains on track to launch a version of its Aspire One netbook with Google’s Android mobile operating system in the third quarter of this year, a company representative said Wednesday.
Microsoft’s move to release three of its drivers to the Linux community could put pressure on other vendors of closed-source Linux drivers to follow suit.
Look for personal computer users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.
Microsoft released set of Linux drivers for its Hyper-V software under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) not because of "perceived obligations" to that license but because it is the preferred license of the Linux community and would benefit both Microsoft customers and users of Linux, according to a company executive.
Interesting article that points out how the GPL turns away many contributors, since people are more likely to contribute to a project if they can reuse their work in any project of their choice.
The popular Subversion source control system’s liberal license enabled Sofa, a commercial software business to contribute value to the community with its extremely polished, award-winning client application. Meanwhile, the newly popular distributed source control systems presents three major choices: git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. All are restricted by the GPL-license, and therefore none is likely to inspire development of a Versions-caliber client.
GPL is for people who are either ideologues or don’t want commercial vendors to profit by building on their work, while failing to realize that they add value in areas that may be important to users but where the open-source community sucks, like UI design.
