Friday, May 04, 2007

O for Orissa

01 - Mahanadi, Brahmani and Baitarani
02 - "Cathedral City of Idia"
03 - Hirakaud Dam 4th Largest in World
04 - Chilka largest Brackish water inland lake in Asia.
05 - Largest Lion Safari in India
06 - Only white tiger safari in World, outskirts of Bhuvaneshwar.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

How Digital Rights Management Works

n 2005, Sony sold millions of "special" music CDs to consumers who thought they were getting regular old compact discs. When people played these CDs on their computer, what happened in many cases was the equivalent of a spyware nightmare: Programs froze up, applications slowed and a series of hidden files that were the source of the problem proved to be nearly impossible to uninstall. Why would Sony do this to its customers?

Full story : http://computer.howstuffworks.com/drm.htm

Follow Up : Suchna

Open Source Licensing and Governance

Earlier this year, arguments and debates raged about whether the open source model was doomed to fail in the 21st century economics of Software As A Service (SAAS). One thread of these discussions centered around the creation of a new type of license that could effectively preserve source code availability and author attribution while denying licensees some of the freedoms enjoyed by the authors, particularly the freedom to present a user interface distinct from so-called attribution.

I have weighed in on the question raised by so-called attribution licenses on license-discuss@opensource.org, but I have always been meaning to write down some thoughts on the flipside of those arguments, namely, how one existing license has brilliantly and effectively protected the three parties to the license--the authors, the users, and other developers--in spite of everything.

Full story : http://www.opensource.org/node/135

Follow up :
1 -  Suchna
2 -  Lampblog

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Major Free Software websites

Slashdot.org, major community and news site with forum
Freshmeat.net, major software release annoumcement site
Advogato.org, the advocate site for free software developers


Follow up :
1 - suchna
2 - lampblog

Major organizations for Free Software/Open Source

Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation Europe
Free Software Foundation India
Software Liberty Association of Taiwan

Software in the Public Interest and its Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/Hurd projects
Linux International
The Open Source Initiative
The XFree86 Project
The Free Standards Group, parent of the Linux Standard Base
The Apache Software Foundation
The GNOME Foundation
The KDE League
Affero, a company enabling fundraising for projects and causes in open source/free software.

Major personalities in the Free Software/Open Source community

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.  Profiled in Steven Levy's 1984 book, Hackers: the Heros of the Computer Revolution as the Last True Hacker, he started the Free Software movement in the 1980s and is considered by many to be the father of Free Software/Open Source.

Linus Torvalds, initial author and top maintainer of the Linux kernel, and possibly the most respected figure in the community.

Larry Wall, author of the popular Perl language.

Eric Raymond, author of the famous paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and responsible for the popularization of the name Open Source

Bruce Perens, editor of the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition, the former considered by the community as the basic law.

Alan Cox, active contributor and maintainer of the Linux kernel.

Guido van Rossum, author of the Python language.

Miguel de Icaza, founder of GNOME.

Follow up : 1 - suchna
                 2 - lampblog