Tag Archives: Free Software

Software is everywhere today. It is in your laptop, phone, watch, pacemaker and soon in your fridge as well. Those who have power over the software have increasingly more power over you and over how society functions. Therefore it is important that nobody has total control over our software. Free Software respects our freedom by allowing us to use, study, share and improve it. This way no single entity can claim the power over it.

The following articles touch the subject of Free Software and are hopefully interesting to you.

First F-Droid Workshop to Happen Soon in Berlin

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If you always wanted to learn how to include new apps into the F-Droid Free Software app repository for Android, then the first F-Droid Workshop is for you. There the F-Droid developers themselves will show you how to do it. When? Saturday the 3rd of August, 2PM – 5PM Where? IN-Berlin (OSM) Who? Daniel Martí and Torsten Grote (F-Droid developer) F-Droid is a project that aims to provide Free Software applications for Android via a repository system, much like most of the GNU/Linux distributions distribute packages. This differs very much from the Google Play approach since the client and server … Continue reading →

Android SDK is now proprietary, Replicant to the rescue

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I just noticed that the Android SDK is now non-free software. If you go to https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html#download and click on one of the files, you are presented with lengthy “Terms and Conditions” which for example say: In order to use the SDK, you must first agree to this License Agreement. You may not use the SDK if you do not accept this License Agreement. This sentence alone already violates freedom 0, the freedom to use the program for any purpose without restrictions. Today, the truly Free Software version of Android called Replicant came to the rescue and released a free (as … Continue reading →

Paying for Free Software

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I would like to be able to pay for more Free Software. Usually people think the great thing about Free Software is that it is free as in free beer. They often neglect the fact that it is free as in free speech. This is probably because they rarely or never make use of this freedom. But since many freedoms benefit us only indirectly, it is still worth fighting for them. I don’t publish a newspaper, still I and society as a whole benefit clearly from having freedom of press. Software freedom is important to me and I refuse to … Continue reading →

UnRAR in Freedom

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The FSF maintains a list of high priority projects. Thanks to The Unarchiver initiative, we are now able to extract recent rar files in freedom and the FSF could remove this item from their list. There used to be a free implementation of unrar, but it is outdated and could only extract very old rar archives. Packages for the new and shiny Unarchiver are already available for Debian and Gentoo. The initiative that made this possible can also be supported via Flattr. … Continue reading →

German Pirate Party Adds Free Software to Agenda

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Last weekend, the German Pirate Party had their federal party convent and managed to add two amendments out of hundreds of proposals to their agenda. My text about a free democratically controlled technological infrastructure which includes Free Software, Open Standards, no Software Patents, nor DRM was one of the two accepted. More information can be found in my German blog post. … Continue reading →

Google and Open Video Standards

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As some of you might have heard, Google released an experimental player for Youtube that works without Adobe Flash, last Wednesday. While they are “very excited about HTML5 as an open standard” (from the announcement), they surprisingly chose not to offer the content as such and instead serve videos in a patent-encumbered format. As Google has not yet stated whether it will add videos in an unencumbered format, this clearly strengthens the stand of proprietary solutions in the ongoing debate about the future of video in HTML and disappoints those of us who expected Google to live up to their … Continue reading →

Brave New Skyping World Revisited

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A vigilant reader of my blog challenged my earlier criticism of Skype thoroughly and even though I felt his remarks could have been tempered a bit, here is my thoughtful response. I am very thankful for all of the comments I receive and encourage more people to express their opinions here. It is only when our opinions are constantly challenged, are we forced to rethink them and are less likely to believe in aged and false dogmas. Below I intend to counter the main points of his argument, but only after I have refashioned and strengthened my main argument. The … Continue reading →

Ten Reasons Why You Should Boycott Skype

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If you want to understand what Skype actually is, it might help to picture an almighty telephone and mail company. This company can not only spy on your private conversations and has total control over them, but it also forces you to use it. It owns the telephone lines and all mail transportation and does not let other companies use them. At the same time, you are bound to only use their telephone and mailboxes. Despite of these facts, more and more people are using Skype and even begin using the word “to skype” as a general term for talking … Continue reading →

Facebook’s outragous Terms of Use

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Many of us knew already that Facebook’s Terms of Use are unacceptable and that nobody should ever use Facebook, but work on a free (as in free speech) alternative to Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook changed their Terms of Use again without notifying its users. It basically grants itself an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license” to do anything they want with all our data. This license never expires and all your data will never be deleted, not even when you delete your account. The Blogosphere covers this in many places. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg defended … Continue reading →