History of new media

http://lizard.artun.ee/~raivo/imke2010

http://lizard.artun.ee/~raivo/imke2010/presentations/priidu_tammeorg.pdf

Open source as business strategy

Many companies are using open source as their business strategy. This is not just giving software away free, but knowing where your outcome is. The best example is dual licensing which is very often done for supporting free software business models. With dual licensing company can sell porprietary software license which allows creating proprietary applications and in the same time can provide also free license with copyleft free or open source license with the requirement the derived work has to be released under the same license. Good example is MySQL Community Edition is available under the GNU license, but there is also MySQL Enterprise which is commercial version and with more possibilities and extra services.

One idea of open source strategy is to go to market with new piece of software by giving this away for free and win customers more easily and grow more easily. By giving this away for free they create unique dependance among their users and with the time users don't even notice that they need this software. Good example is PHP framework Symphony which has fastly growing network of developers creating new plugins and functions for this framework. They also offer Doctrine as ORM for their framework, which is also very fastly growing free ORM. They earn money selling the how to books and trainings, they also have donate, which most of the free software communities use.

My Favourite is Magento open source eCommerce platform, which is using dual licensing way. Magentos community edition is using OSL 3.0 license and Magento enterprise edition is commercially licensed. The latter is more comprehensive and has more possibilities than free edition. There are also widely offered extensions, some of them are free and some commercial.

Copyleft licensing and its usage

Copyleft is ment for supporting the copyright laws by removing the copyright restrictions from the work for distributing and modifing the work with the requirement to retain the same rights for the works are created from the original work.

It is meant for modifying copyrights for works as music, art, documents and computer software.
Basically autor of the work can prohibit other people by reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of his work, but author can give permission to distribute the copies of the work to reproduce the work with the same copyleft licensing scheme. With computer software, example is open source copyleft license which requires to show information about creator of the software and include the the source code.

Using copyleft person can codify his work with the license. Licensing can be either none, weak or strong. Many free software licenses are none copyleft licenses and are not requireing licensee to distribute the software under the same license, and makeing it widely possible to use in proprietary software. For example if you choose a none copyleft license for your software project, your code will possibly spread very quickly if its good enough. Many companies will be interested in it, if they can integrate this to their software. What you get is recognition and maybe become a new standard but, companies who are using you code are getting the profit. Good examples are Apache webserver license and X11.

Weak copyleft like LGPL is mostly used for creating software libraries, because it allowes other software to link to the library and redistribute it without legal issues. For example if you software project is using a weak copyleft license, then possibly your software is adopted by other software companies, because the license allows them to use your software together with theirs. It also means that they can make revenue from the code they develop on the codebase you are giving away free. Good example from weak copyleft licensing is C standard library.

Strong copyleft license such as GNU GPL means that all source code modifications, additions, or derivatives must use the same GPL license. For example if your software uses a strong copyleft license, then companies who are wanting to earn profit from your sourecode don't want to use your code as their connected to your original code, because there could be many conflicts with GPL license. This is the main reason why many companies are not allowing to use GPL in their projects.

Wesnoth - game review

I am very big fan of strategy games. My first experience with Civilization 1. There from I am very found of strategy games and tried to play lot of them. Wesnoth package is small and quick to download and install. It has Estonian language support and is being developed under GNU GPL licence which means that Wesnoth is free software. Wesnoth is turn based game, like Civilization and played on the map. There are different units in the game with their strenghts and weaknesses. Unit strenght is also dependant on the terrain type it is standing on. It shows the % of terrain defence if you want to move your unit there. Units are gaining more strenght if they survive the battle - gain more experience and become stronger. I really like the game core idea and the race segmentation to bad and good. I tried to play good part and was going through various campains. The graphics are not very good, but is not the big issue, though the campaigns are interesting and free to download from the internet. The game is really easy to learn has lots of campaigns to play.
One thing I would like developers to add is to move all objects by selecting them with mouse. That will reduce time of play a lot.

Free and open source software comparsion

So what differs open source software from free software. Open source software is basically same than free software. The difference comes from restrictions in licencing. Free software is totaly free for distribution, copy, modify etc. Open source has it's restrictions in modify and redistributions and accepts more restrictive licences than free software and doesn't accept some free software licences. But more or less the differences are small and almoust all open source is free software and nearly all free software is open source.

Ambiguity of the word free software has raised many questions. Many people have tried to find proper definition to free and open source software and there comes the different understanding of these two schools of thought. Free software developers think that open source software is more meant for corporations. Companies fear the word free, for them it usually means it's buggy and not working and not effiecent and profitable. They tend to go for open source which is more built for business. They think that with open source they can get better quality, because its vendor locked-in type of software. Free software developers think that many software developing companies are using "open source" termin with their PR tricks to sell their software more easily. Some people think that free software thinking is like communist thinking, they tend to see collectivic thinking and problems with no ownership is allowed, but more people think it is liberal movement and is very good for economy.