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The Impact Of Copyleft On Choosing a Software License

 I assume that most people are familiar with Copyright and how authors can protect their rights by Copyrighting their work. But not a lot of people have heard about Copyleft, the movement that practices the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights must be preserved with modified works created from a Copylefted work. The main principles of Copyleft are as follow: The freedom to use the work The freedom to study the work The freedom to copy and share the work with others The freedom to modify the work and distribute modified works There are 3 main categories of Copyleft: Strong Copyleft, Weak Copyleft and No Copyleft. Each category of Copyleft also has their own licenses. I am going to talk about all of the different licenses and what advantages and disadvantages each license has. Strong Copyleft: Strong copyleft basically means that derived work from another strong Copyleft work has to retain the same license as the origin...

My opinion on "The Case For Copyright Reform" by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström

The book "The Case For Copyright Reform" was written to address the main points of the proposal of the copyright reform by the Pirate Party in Sweden. One of the authors, Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and has traveled around the world to talk and write about his ideas of a sensible information policy. The other author, Christian Engström is a member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party. Before getting involved with politics he was a computer programmer, who became involved with politics over the issue of software patents. Chapter 2 - A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform: The Pirate Party's objective is not to abolish copyrights, but to reform them. They only want to keep copyrights for commercial purposes, but make everything else freely available. The attempts to enforce non-commercial sharing of culture between private citizens is threatening basic human rights, such as private communication and freedom of information...

A Short Review Of "Challenges Of The Global Information Society" By Pekka Himanen

Kujutis
 On the 25th of June 2004 Pekka Himanen released a review of the future society, where he looked at the challenges of a global information society. The review was released on the request of Finland's committee for the Future and was discussed at the international congress of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences IIAS, which took place in Korea in July 2004. Dr. Pekka Himanen is an internationally renown researcher of the information age and his works have been published in 20 languages. He has been an advisor for several international and national organizations, institutions and governments. The information society can be defined as a society that is based on interaction. The economy of such a society relies on productivity growth based on innovations. This review is not a futurological study, but describes the areas, where action must be taken to ensure that we respond to the challenges of a future information society successfully. There are 10 main trends th...

The Influence of Multi-User Dungeon Games on Online Communities

Kujutis
 These days multiplayer games are very common and pretty much every one who has ever played a game has played against another player, either on the internet or locally. But how did multiplayer games become so popular and how do they influence online communities now? Multi-User Dungeons also known as MUDs first emerged in the 1970s. The first widely played game of the genre was Colossal Cave Adventure, which was released in 1975. The game used a computer controlled dungeon master and was based off of the famous role-playing adventure board game Dungeons & Dragons also known as D&D. Colossal Cave Adventure Interface The PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) computer system at the University of Illinois was the first instruction system that was assisted by computers. Many modern concepts of multi-user computing were originally developed on PLATO. This included email, message boards, forums, instant messaging and even multi-user dungeons.    ...

2 Pre-Web Technologies That Had Opposite Fates

Kujutis
There have been many technologies that were invented before the creation of the World Wide Web in 1991. Some of them are now obsolete, as many more modern and efficient technologies have pushed the old ones aside. But there are also some technologies that are still widely used to this day. Email Google's Gmail Electronic mail also known as email or e-mail is a method of exchanging messages using electronic devices. Currently there are about 4 billion email accounts and approximately 300 billion emails are sent everyday worldwide. So how did email get it's start? The first email-like software entered usage in the early 1960s, but it had it's limits. You could only send messages if the users were on the same computer and the early versions required the author and the recipient to be both online simultaneously. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson developed the first system that was able to send messages to different hosts on the ARPANET using the @ sign to link user names to servers. By 197...

3 Innovative Ideas In Technology That Ended Up Flopping

Kujutis
 Sometimes there is an idea so innovative and so advanced that it basically screams "I am going to be a major success!" This is a story about 3 of those ideas that for some reason let us down and ended up flopping in a spectacular way. The Apple Newton MessagePad The Apple Newton MessagePad 2000 The Newton MessagePad is a digital personal assistant device developed by Apple. The first MessagePad came out in 1993 and the last version in 1998. It was a revolutionary product for it's time and it is even said to be more innovative than the iPhone 3GS at the time it was released in 1993. At it's release in 1993 the Newton MessagePad was the hottest item at Macworld Expo, where it was first announced. A single device cost $900 and 50,000 devices were sold in the first 3 months. So why does practically nobody know what the MessagePad is today? The original Pads used AAA batteries and they were known for their very short lifetimes. The software also had to learn to identify t...