Finding the right open-source savvy lawyer

Finding the right open-source savvy lawyer

[W]hat if your programmers are using open-source code that's licensed under two different licenses? What if you're concerned with how a patent might affect open-source software your company is already using? Or let's say a company based in Utah decides that you've put its proprietary code into Linux, who do you turn to then? Now, what should you be looking for in a law firm?

An interesting article with a list of specialty firms geared towards open source software licensing, litigation, and intellectual property. A growing niche practice? Given the growing variety and prevalence of open source licenses, I imagine these issues will become more and more common.

UbuntuPoint / Published News

UbuntuPoint / Published News

"A good place for you to discover and share great news about Ubuntu Linux"

This appears to be a new site for questions and information regarding Ubuntu. Watch for 8.04 coming in April! Lifehacker has some screenshots here.

Linux Scanning and OCR: gscan2pdf

gscan2pdf-0.9.23

I've been long overdue in writing on one of my favorite Linux office tools: gscan2pdf.

gscan2pdf is a front-end for a number of excellent Linux tools, including Xsane, tesseract, gocr, unpaper and others.

What this means for you is a free, easy to use program which can scan a document, do optical character recognition (OCR) and save it to a PDF, all with a single click.

The most important feature is OCR. The program uses tesseract and gocr, both very good OCR programs, and attaches the output to the PDF's buffer for each page. This lets you search a term in the PDF document and jump to the page it is on; it also lets search programs like Google Desktop index the PDF so your computer-wide searches include the text inside of scanned documents. The accuracy can be adjusted depending on your CPU power and patience (OCR can be processor intensive). I've done prior posts showing that tesseract is at least as good as other commercial OCR alternatives.

What's best of all, it is a free program built on all free software! A great way to work towards a paperless office.

Linux PDF editor for manipulating PDF documents

Linux PDF editor for manipulating PDF documents

A great article on PDFEdit and other free open source PDF editors. Worth checking out before you drop a bunch of money on Adobe Acrobat.

Biggest legal victory ever for GPL

Biggest legal victory ever for GPL

Linux and a lot of other open source software is licensed under the General Public License, or GPL. Source code distributed under the license can be used and modified, even for commercial purposes, but only if the resulting product's source code is made subject to at least the same restrictions (better known as "copyleft").

The enforceability of the GPL hasn't been tested in court. But Verizon was willing to release source code and make an undisclosed payout rather than challenge it in court. A win that ought to make programmers working under the GPL feel a bit more secure.

EDIT: Note that other licenses like the Apache or BSD license are not "copyleft"; that is, users can modify and distribute the code, but there is no requirement that the derivative work reveal its source code. This causes some concern over companies that promote themselves as pro-open source but use a non-copyleft license. Google, for instance, distributes a lot of code under the Apache license. As this article points out, "open source" is not a black-and-white issue.