Saturday, January 21, 2006

GPLv3 draft

The first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License, version 3, has been published by the Free Software Foundation. This is a the beginning of a public review process that is expected to take the rest of 2006. The new license includes lots of rewording for clarification and new definitions that were missing from GPL 2, as well as aggressive new clauses dealing with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and replacing "distribution" with "propagation", broadening the application of the copyleft to include edge cases such as running an application on a publicly-available server. The license also contains compatibility clauses increasing the flexibility of combining GPL software withsoftware under other free copyleft licenses.

http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft

Saturday, January 07, 2006

KDE 4 to incorporate Solid device and network capabilities

After a lot of coding behind the scenes, a new initiative to improve
KDE's interaction with network and hardware devices has been launched.
Solid, will provide an API for better interaction with dynamically
changing hardware and network environments as a result of newer wireless
and hotplugging environments. The project aims to start including these
features in KDE 4.

"Solid will be a giant leap for KDE," says project lead Kévin Ottens.
"For example, the desktop will be able to deal wisely with your computer
hibernating. You'd want network interfaces to go down and for
network-enabled applications to gracefully handle the disconnection; USB
devices should be synced to avoid data loss".

http://dot.kde.org/1136389547/