Tag: GPL

If you've been keeping up with the VLC for iOS saga, the cross platform media player saw its brief stint in the App Store come to an end yesterday. While VLC's outspoken frontman Remi Denis-Courmant seemed pretty convinced that this would happen as far back as October 2010, some on the VLC mailing lists figured that distribution via Cydia would be an option -- since it would allow for a fully ...

If you happened to head to the App Store this morning to search for, say, a new media player with support for a number of video formats, you may have noticed something: VLC is no longer available. A quick search returns several remote apps, but the recently-released player itself is nowhere to be found -- the VLC app has, in fact, been removed from the App Store. Ultimately, it appears as ...

Notepad++ is a great open source text editor. In addition to being open source, it's extensible and incredibly nimble for a beast of its power. I often use Java-based jEdit or XUL-based Komodo Edit, and compared to those two, Notepad++ is blazing fast. The Notepad++ team released 5.8 a short while ago, but it was worth holding out on the upgrade -- because they've now released 5.8.1 with a couple ...

May aunt walt lumen thyme, people. Now you all know my secret! Well, not really, but that's the passphrase that PWGen, a free, open source password generator for Windows, came up with after I tweaked some of its settings. After telling you about Diceware, which lets you generate passphrases from your browser, it's now time to look at a more robust Windows utility that does the same (but ...

BrainParty is extremely popular on the App Store at $0.99, packing 36 fun puzzle games into a single download and charting just how much gray matter you're packing. To share the fun with an even bigger audience, its developer has decided to release the source code under the GPLv3 license. Want to play the games on your system? Just download the source code and compile it. BrainParty has ...

To say that Microsoft and Novell have a muddy history when it comes to open-source projects and the GPL would be an understatement. Things were looking up, with the release of the open-source implementation of Silverlight, Moonlight 2, last week, but today things took a turn for the worse: Novell has just cut all the open source code from MonoDevelop. The implications of this aren't ...

Samsung, JVC, Best Buy and 11 other consumer electronics companies have just been smacked-down for their continued breaching of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has just filed a lawsuit, stating that the companies have had plenty of time to respond to repeated requests of compliance with the GPL. Now their fate rests with the justice system... and I ...

When I wrote up Microsoft's free tool to copy downloaded Windows 7 images to USB flash drives or burn then to DVD, I thought the app seemed like a great idea. After all, it provided student downloaders an easy way to get their cheapo upgrades copied onto install media. Rafael Rivera was doing his usual Columbo routine on the MS tool's source when he found something in the code which struck him. A ...

I'm always on the lookout for apps that can ease my workload or free up some room in my budget, and open source applications are an excellent way for me to accomplish both. If you're in the same boat as me, hopefully you're already utilizing some open source options. If not, I've put together this list of two dozen great applications that I can depend on to keep things running smoothly on my ...

Over the past few years, we've seen a number of artists, software developers and others release their work under non-traditional copyright licenses. Historically, copyright laws have been used to prevent others from redistributing your work. But Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License allow content makers to distribute their work for free -- while insisting upon certain conditions. ...

We can't deny some of us here at Download Squad love open source software. But there's not a damn fool here that will disagree with the statement: "Bill Gates is an extremely intelligent man." We won't disagree that he's done amazing things for technology as a whole. And yes, we even wish heartily we had the faith in ourselves to say if we had that much moolah, we'd be even half as charitable with ...

The folks who brought you the original SimCity nearly 20 years ago have now brought you the free edition of that game. Not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech. The SimCity source code has been released for anyone who wants to port it run on other devices or operating systems, or wants to modify the game to create their own version. The decision to release the the SimCity source ...

Just a few days after open-source developers took Monsoon Multimedia to court over alleged copyright violations, Monsoon has admitted guilt and has begun negotiating a settlement. What makes this interesting is that the copyright Monsoon Multimedia violated was technology protected by the General Public License or GPL. In other words, Monsoon had every right to use the open source technology. What ...

It's no secret that a lot of consumer electronics devices are built using Linux and other open source software. That includes well known products like TiVo, and somewhat lesser known items like Monsoon Multimedia's Hava place-shifting device (it's a lot like a Slingbox, but there's a wireless model). Open source software is often powerful, stable, and most importantly, available. The open source ...

MySQL's VP of community relations Kaj Arno's he explains in his blog that MySQL has changed its license from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv2 only", so MySQL doesn't have to be forced to use the GPLv3, which as you know is not so widely adopted yet. MySQL may very well move to the new v3 license once it becomes more commonplace, but for now, they don't want to put users and developers in a tight spot ...