• BRAZIL

Getting off the ground at LinuxWorld

2005-08-10

Eben Moglen, founder of the new Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia law professor from New York, stopped by the GNOME booth at LinuxWorld, San Francisco. He wanted to invite GNOME Foundation's participation in the review of an upcoming revised GNU General Public License.



With a GPL3 long awaited, Professor Moglen and Richard Stallman are working on a language that will be posted early next year for community review. The public comments period is expected to take a year. We asked Professor Moglen what we might see on the patent issue in the revised license. In answer to that question, he described a large GPL community with a spectrum of opinion from large global companies that want a carve out on patents to free software developers who prefer the punitive revoking of GPL rights in cases of patent conflicts.

The .org pavilion at LinuxWorld is always a hub of vibrant activity and mutual aid among projects. Whether it's borrowing a pair of scissors or the sharing of network connections, hardware and information, the .org pavilion just works. It has become a cornerstone of LWE since we first proposed to IDG that they put all the community projects together after their first show in 1999.


The LTSP.org team unpacks the thin clients

LinuxWorld was first held in San Jose before moving to San Francisco. It is now located in this city's new Moscone West (Moscone North and South now occupied by a large gift store expo.) We haven't seen the new building's loading dock, but it was sure nice to see the delivery of thin clients arrive, even though the expo had already opened. The guys at LTSP had two of them up and running at the GNOME booth in no time. Pity the poor coordinator from Ricoh who was hunting down his two boxes (one printer) while the set-up crew sat waiting over the weekend. "Two boxes?"
"That's two sets of paper."
"We have the paperwork, we just don't have the boxes."

The .org pavilion remains the place to see the latest in open source technology.



Stuart Anderson stopped by to demo the new USB powered pocket server from Black Dog. The ipod size Debian powered device comes with a biometric scanner and a 400Mhz PowerPC processor with flash memory.