Gpl News & Articles

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) imposed by Apple on its App Store make the iconic VLC Media Player an outlaw there. Legal contradictions (DRM vs GPL) deprive Apple users of one of the best video players.

German web content management vendor Innovation Gate Gmbh decided earlier this year to rebrand version 5 of their Java-based product as open source. Let's take a look at what they're offering and where it fits.

Welcome to the June installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Squiz (news, site) breaks away from its normal monthly update news to bring breaking details about a bunch of updates, adjustments and improvements to both MySource Matrix and MySource Mini.

In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang.

Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and eleven other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes fourteen defendants.

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

WordPress (news, site) just launched their own Superman. Labeled the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit org is designed to “democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.”

In other words, and straight from the horse’s mouth:

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks.

The goals of the software projects they plan to promote are:

• The software should be licensed under the GNU Public License.
• The software should be freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, and without permission.
• The software should be open to modifications.
• Any modifications should be freely distributable at no cost and without permission from its creators.
• The software should provide a framework for translation to make it globally accessible to speakers of all languages.
• The software should provide a framework for extensions so modifications and enhancements can be made without modifying core code.

Examples of projects that embrace the philosophy include WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, BuddyPress, and of course, the Web CMS itself. 

Feeling charitable? Donate. 

Welcome to the November 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project updates.

Since its launch in 2004, CMS Made Simple (news, site) has hit the three quarters of a million mark with more than 500 copies of the latest version being downloaded per day.

One of the simplest methods of ensuring that your published words don't end up looking functionally illiterate is to use a spell checker. But what if you're in need of a bit more help?

You could pay an editor or make an agreement with a friend to edit each other's work. But you may not be able to afford an editor, or may not have any friends you wish to trust in this way, or may not have any friends, period. Sniff.

Now here's the good news. WordPress (news, site) users gained access to a built-in personal editor in September, thanks to Automattic's (news, site) release of the SaaS-based spell checker called After the Deadline.

After the Deadline was already available for free to WordPress users. Now, Automattic -- a company name that all but begs for a spell checker -- has taken this spelling, grammar and style-checking tool, and released it under the GPL as open source. There are a number of client libraries for interfacing with the tool:

• jQuery API (MIT/LGPL)
• Python Library by Miguel Ventura (MIT License)
• Ruby Library by Danny Tatom (MIT License)
• TinyMCE Plugin (LGPL)

Whether or not you trust such tools, they can be an interesting way to catch awkward portions of your writing, and at the very least make you think about the phrases they highlight. Try out the demo and consider whether such a tool would enhance your open source content management system. The source code is available here.

(And yes, we fed this article through the demo. It had a couple of reasonable complaints, one that made no sense, missed some items we had expected it to mark, and didn't completely choke on the URLs.)

Even before economies around the world got into a bit of a bind, the term open source was growing more and more popular. Since so many now equate open source with free, savings, cost efficiency and other such fiscal positives, the number of commercial software companies hitching the term to their products has increased. But are all of them actually doing open source in the fuller sense of the term?

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. One of the students accepted into the program was Naveen Gavini, an undergraduate Computer Engineering and Computer Science student at New Jersey-based Rutgers University.

Naveen's project -- focused on multi-site functionality for the popular Joomla! (news, site) Web CMS -- is on schedule and going well. But what does multi-site support for mean for you? Let's take a look.

WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved--even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

The Joomla Web CMS project -- as many of you well know -- is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, among other things, that the Joomla project generally has an ethos of encouraging collaboration, community and free software.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.

A wave of excitement shot through the Internet as bloggers suddenly noticed that Amazon (news, site) had posted the source code for each version of the Kindle.

However, the code is really just the GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers (Debian Linux is the common speculation), and it's been available since 2007. The e-book reader part is in no way part of the source package.

While no license file is attached, the folder the code unpacks into is called "gplrelease," which might be a massive hint. Not to mention all that's in there is what would be required for them to release legally for the GPL portions.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon had hinted recently at a conference that Kindle books and Kindle readers were, to him, two separate businesses. Releasing a Kindle iPhone app was certainly one hint that he was serious. Another was his statement that he intended to give the Kindle device team competition by making the Kindle books available on even more mobile and computing devices.

But entirely releasing the Kindle source doesn't appear to be the way they're going to do it just now. Who knows, maybe later if Amazon decides it would rather offer their content on more devices and get out of the hardware business.