The Bitkom Open Source Guide 3.0: A Comprehensive Upgrade

For 6 years, the Bitkom Open Source Guide 2.0 was a welcome first point of contact for German companies regarding the appropriate use of open-source software. It was a stimulating source and benchmark at the same time. But like everything else in the world, it has aged over time. Thus, it’s good to know that Bitkom and its ‘Open Source’ working group have taken up the topic again. In June 2022, there was officially released an expanded and refined Bitkom Open Source Guide 3.0, – again intended to be a manual and a benchmark for companies → …

Open-Source of 2022-07-11 about , etc. with 0 comments

Musicology and LaTeX

Musicologists have a hard time – namely if they want to enrich their LaTeX-texts by score examples and harmony analyses. Up to now, there did not exist any study of whether and how that could be realized with free software. This article summarizes a paper – written in German – concerning the topic LaTeX and Musicology, which on the quiet has become a self-referential tutorial teaching what’s possible and what is not. → …

REPORT of 2022-04-24 about , , , , , etc. with 0 comments

Illustrating Open-Source Posts

I love ZEN-presentations, especially when they deal with open-source software. To create such files, we need pictures. Many pictures. That’s why I keep stumbling over the question of whether the FOSS licenses also allow us to use icons and logos in the same way as the code? Moreover: Under which conditions may we illustrate our articles with ‘internet-pictures‘ ? I’ve always wanted to make that clear to myself → …

INSPECTION of 2022-02-25 about , , etc. with 1 comment

TDOSCA & OSCake: Automating FOSS Compliance

By releasing the Open Source License Compendium and the Open Source Compliance Advisor, Deutsche Telekom has already supported the task to deal with Open Source Compliance. But DT offers so many and complex Open Source based products that it is too expensive to create the necessary Open Source compliance artifacts manually. Thus, DT needs a practically usable automated toolchain. → …

REPORT of 2020-11-28 about , , etc. with 0 comments

gtgt Or The Life After

In 2000, I had released the Gnu Template Generation Tools that instantiate a set of sources which were readily prepared for being developed, compiled, and installed with the GNU ‘Autoconf/Automake’ development environment. A few years later they were passed – by new languages, techniques, and tools. But now we have revitalized gtgt for special reasons of open source compliance: → …

REPORT of 2020-08-21 about , , , etc. with 0 comments

YOCTO, IoT, and the GPLv3

IoT gadgets often only offer interfaces which do not allow to inspect or to modify their software. YOCTO tries to build specific software of IOT gadgets. And the GPLv3 requires that GPLv3 licensed software must be replaceable. So, we might ask, how YOCTO deals with this contradiction? → …

INSPECTION of 2019-06-30 about , , etc. with 1 comment