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Tivoization
Tivoization () is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants". The Free Software Foundation explicitly forbade tivoization in version 3 of the GNU General Public License. However, although version 3 has been adopted by many software projects, the authors of the Linux kernel have notably declined to move from version 2 to version 3. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TiVo
TiVo ( ) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by Xperi (previously by TiVo Corporation and TiVo Inc.) and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "OnePass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList" searches which allow the user to find and record shows that match their interests by title, actor, director, category, or keyword. TiVo also provides a range of features when the TiVo digital video recorders, TiVo DVR is connected to a home network, including film and TV show downloads, advanced search, online scheduling, and at one time, personal photo viewing and local music playback. Since its launch in its home market of the United States, TiVo has also been made available in Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Taiwan, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Newer models, however, have adopted the CableCARD standard, which is on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defective By Design
Defective by Design (DBD) is a grassroots anti-digital rights management (DRM) initiative by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and CivicActions. Launched in 2006, DBD believes that DRM (which they call "digital ''restrictions'' management") makes technology deliberately defective, negatively affects digital freedoms, and is "a threat to innovation in media, the privacy of readers, and freedom for computer users." The initiative regularly campaigns against the use of DRM by the media industry and software industry to increase awareness of the anti-DRM movement and pressure industries into no longer using DRM. They are known for their use of hazmat suits in their demonstrations. DBD represents one of the first efforts of the FSF to find common cause with mainstream social activists and encourage free software advocates to become socially involved. As of late 2006, the campaign was claiming over 12,000 registered members. Position According to their website, DBD believes th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vendor Lock-in
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lockin, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. The use of open standards and alternative options makes systems tolerant of change, so that decisions can be postponed until more information is available or unforeseen events are addressed. Vendor lock-in does the opposite: it makes it difficult to move from one solution to another. Lock-in costs that create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly. Lock-in types ; Monopolistic : Whether a single vendor controls the market for the method or technology being locked in to. Distinguishes between being locked to the mere technology, or specifically the vendor of it. This class of lock-in is potentially technologically hard to overcome if the monopoly is held up by barriers to market that are nontrivial to circumvent, such as patents, secre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital computers in the mid-20th century. Early programs were written in the machine language specific to the hardware. The introduction of high-level programming languages in 1958 allowed for more human-readable instructions, making software development easier and more portable across different computer architectures. Software in a programming language is run through a compiler or Interpreter (computing), interpreter to execution (computing), execute on the architecture's hardware. Over time, software has become complex, owing to developments in Computer network, networking, operating systems, and databases. Software can generally be categorized into two main types: # operating systems, which manage hardware resources and provide services for applicat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Relicensing
Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one. Motivation and description Sometimes open-source software projects get stuck in a license incompatibility situation. Often the only feasible way to resolve this situation is re-licensing of all participating software parts. For successful relicensing the agreement of all involved copyright holders, typically the developers, to a changed license is required. While in the free and open-source domain achieving 100% coverage of all authors is often impossible due to the many contributors involved, often it is assumed that a great majority is sufficien ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software Culture And Documents
Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, the ability to act or change without constraint or restriction * Emancipate, attaining civil and political rights or equality * Free (''gratis''), free of charge * Gratis versus libre, the difference between the two common meanings of the adjective "free". Computing * Free (programming), a function that releases dynamically allocated memory for reuse * Free software, software usable and distributable with few restrictions and no payment *, an emoji in the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block. Mathematics * Free object ** Free abelian group ** Free algebra ** Free group ** Free module ** Free semigroup * Free variable People * Free (surname) * Free (rapper) (born 1968), or Free Marie, American rapper and media personality * Free, a pseudonym for the activist and writer Abbie Hoffman * Free (active 2003–), American musician in the band FreeSol Arts and media Film and television * ''Free'' (film), a 2001 American dramedy * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glibc
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system. glibc is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The GNU C Library project provides the core libraries for the GNU system, as well as many systems that use Linux kernel, Linux as the kernel (operating system), kernel. These libraries provide critical APIs including ISO C11 (C standard revision), C11, POSIX.1-2008, Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD, OS-specific APIs and more. These APIs include such foundational facilities as open (system call), open, read (system call), read, write (system call), write, malloc, printf format string, printf, getaddrin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Newsforge
Geeknet, Inc. is an American company that is a subsidiary of GameStop based in Fairfax County, Virginia. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in November 1993 by Stanford University graduate student Larry Augustin and James Vera. Augustin was a Stanford colleague of Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!. VA Research started to build and sell personal computer systems installed with the Linux operating system, as an alternative to more expensive Unix workstations that were available at the time. During its initial years of operation, the business was profitable and grew quickly, with over $100 million in sales and a 10% profit margin in 1998. It was the vendor of pre-installed Linux computers, with approximately 20% of the Linux hardware market. In October 1998, the company received investments of $5.4 million from Intel and Sequoia Capital. In March and April 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BusyBox
BusyBox is a software suite that provides several List of Unix commands, Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android (operating system), Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with interfaces provided by the Linux kernel. It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Linux on embedded systems, Embedded Linux", as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, GNU General Public License v2, after controversially deciding not to move to GNU General Public License#Version 3, version 3. History Origins Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1995 and declared complete for his intended usage in 1996, BusyBox initially aimed to put a complete Booting, bootable system on a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Cox (computer Programmer)
Alan Cox (born 22 July 1968) is a British computer programmer who has been a key figure in the development of Linux. He maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in its development, an association that dates back to 1991. He lives in Swansea, Wales, where he lived with his wife Telsa Gwynne, who died in 2015, and now lives with author Tara Neale, whom he married in 2020. He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from Swansea University in 1991 and received an MBA from the same university in 2005. Involvement in the Linux kernel While employed on the campus of Swansea University, Cox installed a very early version of Linux on one of the machines belonging to the university computer society. This was one of the first Linux installations on a busy network and revealed many bugs in the networking code. Cox fixed many of these bugs and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem. He then became one of the main developers and main ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Debconf
is a software utility for performing system-wide configuration tasks on Unix-like operating systems. It is developed for the Debian Linux distribution, and is closely integrated with Debian's package management system, dpkg. When packages are being installed, asks the user questions which determine the contents of the system-wide configuration files associated with that package. After package installation, it is possible to go back and change the configuration of a package by using the ''dpkg-reconfigure'' program, or another program such as Synaptic. The design of allows for front-ends for answering configuration questions to be added in a modular way, and there exist several, such as one for dialog, one for readline, one that uses a text editor, one for KDE, one for GNOME, a Python front-end API, etc. The original implementation of is in Perl. During the development of Debian-Installer, a new implementation in C was developed, which is named '. The new implementation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
