Much like a Tesla, all analogies break down eventually. As many many many people have said - free software is free, in much the same way as a free puppy is free. I prefer to think of it as being free just like being given a free house is free. Imagine that! Being given a free house would solve so many immediate problems. You'd have shelter, warmth, an administrative address, and a stake in the local community. All for free! Brilliant! Of course, your furniture isn't going to quite fit. So…
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The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story. Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW's compliance with the licence terms. I took a look through the car's user interface and, hidden away, was this email address. I dropped them an email. And then a reminder. Well, today I received this…
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I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at the copious mentions of systemd and freedesktop it's a Linux system! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Its-a-Unix-system-short-SpLRTAGa6bU.mp4 Hmmm... I…
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This blog is proud to be XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliant. Just like it is polite to use correct spelling and grammar for human readers, I believe that correct markup is "polite" for rendering engines. I've recently started using DynamicWP's Simple White Theme. The theme is excellent, but generated around 60 validation errors. Luckily these were caused by a scant half dozen errors in the source code. Here is a quick summary of the errors, why they need to be fixed, and how to fix them. (more…) …
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