Heather Meeker's Open Source Licensing Resources

The European Legal Network has released a document addressing what kind of software interactions create derivative works -- primarily relevant to the interpretation of the General Public License.  "The aim of this document is to provide some general guidance to lawyers and developers working with free software to understand the technical and (potentially) legal effects of the interaction or interoperation of two programs together."  The document was created by a Special Interest Group made up of delegates from the European Legal Network, which is "a neutral, private network of legal professionals facilitated by FSFE."

A recent story in the New York Times discusses the lobbying efforts of Open Forum Europe.  The lobbying effort focuses on the issuance of the European Interoperability Framework, which contains recommendations by the European Commission regarding the purchase of software by EU national and local governments -- which constitutes an estimated market of over $15 billion.   The release of this document is scheduled by the end of 2010.   Several drafts of the document are available on FSFE's web site.  The NYT article also discusses the effect on Microsoft's effort in Europe.

Mozilla has submitted an iPhone App that is not Firefox, exactly, but dovetails with Firefox features.  One of the cooler features, discussed at the Summit today, was Firefox Sync, which lets Firefox users access the history, bookmarks, and open tabs across stationary computers and mobile computing devices.  Apple has previously had a policy that effectively excluded browsers as apps, but it nevertheless approved an Opera app.

Just a quick post to say that I am at the 2010 Summit and it is very exciting to see what is on the drawing board at Mozilla -- which is metophorical of course, because it is really the drawing board of a huge community of worldwide developers.  If you want a little bit of vicarious participation, check out the Twitter Flickr etc. feed.

Washington DC will launch a test of OSDV's software, for overseas voters.    The District of Columbia’s Board of Election and Ethics (BOEE) announced that they will adopt OSDV's TrustTheVote technology as part of a digital “Vote by Mail” ballot transport service pilot project for overseas ballots.  OSDV's John Sebes blogs about it here.   Sebes explains that the D.C. pilot is not “online voting” per se, but a test of an additional form of digital transport for return of blank ballots.   Absentee ballots can already be obtained digitally via email or web, and returned via email or fax. 

The Navy Times reports, "During the November 2008 election, some 2,800 D.C. voters were sent ballots overseas, but fewer than half were actually returned and counted. Almost 300 were not counted because of problems like a voter forgetting to sign the envelope, and 36 were too late. The new system could help fix some of those problems."

If I may be allowed a brief editorial comment -- mindful that I have worked with OSDV as a client -- Yay, team!