A Planet blog is a blog where all the posts come from other blogs. Visit the GNOME.org Planet blog for an example. On one side you see a list of all the people whose blogs make up planet.gnome.org, on the other side you see the blog posts.

The question I’d like you to consider is: Should Planet blogs ask permission before including someone’s blog in their Planet?

I have two answers:

• Today: yes

  Today, a Planet blog is built by a program that makes copies of blog posts for the purpose of distribution when someone visits the Planet blog. When copying and distribution come into play, copyright law kicks in and one should get permission.

• Tomorrow: no

  Sometime in the future (what I’m calling “tomorrow”) Planet blogs may work differently. They may work by having the visitor’s web browser do all the blog post collection work. This means that the visitor is requesting the copies from each of the participating blogs and this copy is most likely being made for personal viewing, not distribution. In other words, the visitor’s web browser is doing almost the same work it would do if the visitor went to each of those blogs. To me, this is not something that ought to be considered the same way as how Planet blogs work now. This is basically linking and should not require permission (just as recommending a book to someone and telling them where to get that book doesn’t require permission).

Occasionally I come across articles about Google that say they can’t understand Google’s business plan. Google’s business plan seems obvious to me and has for some time now—collect and index data about a large number of people and then deliver interesting summaries of that information to their paying clients. They’ll acquire the information by providing seemingly attractive gratis services to the world.

At first blush, using services people seem to want (spreadsheet, search engine, database, word processor, etc.) in order to collect information about you that they can either leak (release on accident) or sell (release on purpose) seems like a good bargain so long as the services are available gratis. Sadly, most people don’t look beyond the glitzy services Google offers, so they won’t encourage others to think beyond what they’re getting from Google.

I want to encourage you to think more deeply about this because online services are coming back into vogue.

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Here’s a nice book for you to share with children: The Pig and the Box. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license so you can share it non-commercially as much as you like. You can even build on it, remix it, translate it, and make new stuff based on it so long as you license your new stuff under the same license. If you don’t like any part of it you can change it and republish it non-commercially.

The PDF file you can view or print anywhere and the source files you can more easily remix into something new.

Some folks have already helped by translating the book into Spanish, French, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, and Italian. There’s also a coloring book version.

And there’s also a book called “The Crow Who Could Fly” in English, German, Hungarian, and Spanish.

Read more about the books and help support the author.

Someone who apparently works for Novell (a distributor of a GNU/Linux system) named “dobey” asks

I continue to see people blog about how site foo doesn’t use open source software to play videos, or how company bar won’t release some piece of code as open source. And the big argument here is always how it limits the freedom of people, particularly a very small subset of the development world. But does it really limit freedom, more than the alternatives might?

First, the open source movement was started in part to get away from framing anything in terms of a user’s software freedom. The open source movement wants to speak strictly in terms of practicalities particularly for programmers, not ethics or the effect on users, so the free software movement and the open source movement have a different way of looking at the world.

Second, yes, it does. With non-free codecs you are restricted in the same ways any other non-free software restricts you. Practical consequences of not having these freedoms include:

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Ars Technica reports on a developing case where Macrovision, developers of a well-known video anti-copying technique preventing easy duplication of DVDs and videotapes, sued Sima, developer of a well-known anti-Macrovision device one can plug in between a DVD player and a VCR (or two VCRs) to make copies.

If Sima loses, what rights do you lose in the process?

Recently some work was done with the GNOME logo and it was clear that the GNOME logo artists had chosen a non-free font—Trebuchet MS—for the text. The same critique applies to all of what were once known as the Microsoft “Core Fonts”. Microsoft no longer distributes these fonts but others have distributed copies under their license which allows verbatim non-commercial reproduction and distribution.

Trebuchet can be redistributed so long as one redistributes it in its CAB file (there is a free software program to extract the fonts from the CAB file). This is not a reason why the Trebuchet MS font is non-free.

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Intel releases source code to drive its upcoming video hardware under the MIT license (a non-copylefted free software license). Here’s a list of the hardware you can use with this software (these are the video cards to choose from when buying your next video card, laptop, or desktop machine):

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