Software Law and Open Source Liability

Software licensing with open source software creates some interesting legal questions for software law. These concerns are something any Silicon Valley company looking to release or use any open or quasi-open software should assess and integrate into its strategy. There are issues with using the software and understanding exactly what its clauses mean, problems with issuing this type of software without the right protections against liability, and concerns about ensuring that open source software doesn’t contain any secretly malicious code – and how to legally approach that problem if it comes up.

Software law relating to intellectual property and theft, liability, and risk adapted to deal with basic software issues years ago. Whether software is used through purchase or some sort of temporary license, the basic regulations for products and services that have applied for all other businesses continue to change based on complex software interactions, but they remain fundamentally sound and relatively straightforward. Liability and ownership are explicitly defined. But issues get murkier and more complex when it comes to open source software law. There are concrete distribution terms set by the oversight organization Opensource.org, and they establish restrictions on activity and use.

One of the biggest risks from this type of software is Intellectual Property infringement. Many major open source projects involve the collaboration of many people, any one of whom could deliberately or accidently introduce a piece of code lifted from a copyrighted product. This puts the company or organization backing the software at risk, and can even cause problems for companies using the software depending on how they acquired it and what they did with the software. This risk also represents one of the more general problems with open source software. It is more difficult to be confident about the software and its integrity. Software lawyers can help assess the terms of this kind of software, prepare documents to effectively protect clients from these risks, and instruct clients about where their liability lies in these types of situations.

The other prominent risk is that the software will cause some harm. Generally, licensees are protected from this risk by clauses in the software licensing contract. But with open source IP there are fewer methods to hold the creators liable. Problems could be as simple as a mistake in the software’s code that leads to a less-than-accurate result which leads the user to be less efficient than it could have been. Or they can be larger, and result in a security breach or significant data loss. There are no strong warrantees in open source licenses, so legal remedies are few. An expert software law attorney can assess the options a client would have in this event, to help evaluate how worthwhile the risk is.

Software law is generally very effective in protecting both sides from negligence and dishonesty. However, in the case of open source software, companies need to exercise much more caution in everything they do.

Software Law for Open Source Licensing and Liability Is a Unique Field of Law. Invest in Understanding It Before Using It. Learn More at http://nefflaw.com/.

Austrumi 2.4.5: Small and Mighty

Recently I wrote that visitors of Linux notes from DarkDuck come from all over the world. There are almost no white spots on the map if you look at the list of the visitors’ countries.
Some of my readers live in Latvia. Not a majority, of course. In fact, Latvia is number 64 in the list of the annual statistics, somewhere next to Kenya.

That does not mean I should never look in the direction of that country. There is at least one reason for doing so: Latvia is the native country of the Linux distribution Austrumi. It is a small pocket-size Linux distribution which I have written about once before.
The Austrumi team released a new version of their operating system recently, on the 30th of September, 2011.
Unfortunately, links on the original site still lead to the old version. To get the fresh ISO image, I used links from Softpedia, which lead to different files on the same server. The latest version is 2.4.5.
ISO image size of Austrumi 2.4.5 is about 210 Mb, which is about twice the size of the version I looked at a year ago. It was previously only 120 Mb in size. Even so, 210 Mb definitely puts Austrumi into the category of "pocket" distributions, those which you can take with you anywhere on a USB or CD.
Unfortunately, Unetbootin was not able to "burn" image to USB. That is why I had to burn it to DVD-RW.
So, the disk is in the optical drive. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Lets go!

Another off-line publication

Приветствую всех читателей журнала User and Linux, зашедших на мой блог. Буду рад видеть вас здесь многократно. Для этих целей можете воспользоваться одним из многих вариантов подписки на обновления - все они перечислены в правом столбце.

Тем, кто недостаточно владеет английским языком для чтения блога в оригинале, рекомендую пользоваться функцией автопереводчика все в том же правом столбце.

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As you may already know, I am not only writing my posts on this blog, but also do guest posting on other blogs from time to time. Not only on-line blogs actually. September saw my first ever publication in off-line press. It was magazine User and Linux. I have written about this.

I am happy to announce another issue of User and Linux with my publications. As usual, they are Russian translations of blog posts. What you can find in recent issue? It is dedicated to Ubuntu, so all the articles are about this Operating system.

• Adventures in Ubuntu 11.10 Live (page 40)
• 4 Terribly Easy Steps To Move Away From Unity In Ubuntu 11.04 (page 48)

You can read magazine on-line or download PDF. Or you can read original posts on this blog. Choice is yours, as usual!

AgiliaLinux 8.0.0: Ooops, We Did It (Again)!

Linux is everywhere in the world. When I look at a map of where visitors to my blog come from, I see almost the whole world map covered. Of course, the majority of visitors come from the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, India and other English-speaking countries. But there are still visitors from some relatively small non-English speaking countries like Serbia, Croatia, Israel, and even Madagascar and Angola. They are all interested in Linux.
Of course Russia is on the list. In fact, it is in 14^th place, according to the year's worth of statistics.

I wrote about Russian distributions several times, and I am pleased to do so, because Russia is my motherland. Alt Linux, Simply Linux and Agilia Linux were already covered. Of course I try to keep my hands on the pulse of events. That's why I could not miss the opportunity to get my hands on new release from Agilia Linux team. Their new version AgiliaLinux 8.0.0 saw the world on the 03.10.2011.
Stop, you could ask, why is this version 8 then? Because AgiliaLinux is not a brand-new distribution. It is based on MOPSLinux, a project which stopped development. The previous version of AgiliaLinux was more or less a remake of MOPS. The current version is a fully independent development.
This version was planned for release ages ago. A member of the development team wrote a comment on my post about AgiliaLinux 7 stating that version 8 was due in June. And finally... in October they did it!
AgiliaLinux 8.0.0's ISO image size is about 2.4GB. I downloaded it from one of the mirrors. If you are a fan of torrents, you have that downloading option too, but it requires registration at the rutracker.org torrent portal.
When the downloading was complete, I burned the ISO image onto a DVD disk. So the DVD-RW is in the optical drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Let's go!

Half a Million

When I have started this blog, I did not know how long it would continue.

Neither I knew how popular it would become.

Just to give you some flavour. 

• There were only 341 pageviews in whole November 2010.
• There were only 471  pageviews in whole December 2010.
• And then, for a change, there were 5792  pageviews on the 12th of December 2011. The biggest number so far.

Do you feel the difference?

On average, there are more than 1500 pageviews per day now. More than whole year 2010 saw!

And today blog Linux notes from DarkDuck reached another important threshold. We have 500,000 (five hundred thousand) pageviews! Yes, that's half a million.

500 000

Great results, I think!

Thank you to all my readers who come here to get some more information about Linux distributions and Free open source software in general. Thank you for your support, tolerance and love!

Geek-in-Pink: When I installed Mandrake on my computer, my boyfriend was not happy at all.

There are different people. There are different Linux users. Generally, you can split all people in the world into two categories: men and women. But should we split Linux world by gender? Some people still believe we should. Many others think we shouldn't.
My today's guest is Jonquil McDaniel. She is Linux user with more than 6 year experience and owner of the blog xjonquilx | Sabayon, Ubuntu, Fedora, Oh My!
She calls herself Geek-in-Pink sometimes. Now she brings in some pink colour into my blog.

Mint Cocktail: Mojito or Molotov

My first approach to this Linux distribution took place about a year ago, in December 2010. It was one of the first distributions I've tried. Did I like it? Yes, I did. But not as a whole. The thing I did not like was actually one of the most important parts of desktop Linux. I did not like the menu.
How many Linux distributions do you know that develop their own menus? Other than this one, I can only name one, Mandriva 2011, which uses a menu from ROSA Labs, their sister company.
I later tried different Linux distributions from same team, and even had one of them installed on my laptop for some time. Have you already guessed which distribution I am going to talk about today? Yes? Yes!

It's Linux Mint. Their latest release is called Linux Mint 12 Lisa. It was officially published on the 26th of November 2011. As usual for Linux Mint, (at least their main branch), it is based on the latest version of Ubuntu, this time being Ubuntu 11.10.
Unlike Ubuntu, Linux Mint does not keep the size of their distribution's ISO image to 700 MB. The latest release "weighs" about 1Gb. It is larger than a CD, so you need either a DVD-R(W) or a USB stick to get this operating system booted or installed.
I downloaded Linux Mint 12 Lisa from a torrent file. There are plenty of users who seed this image, so downloading was very quick. Once downloading was finished, I used Unetbootin to "burn" the ISO image to an 8GB USB stick.
Preparations are over. It's time to reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!