Jagamiskultuur: motivatsioon, ärimudelid ja häkkerieetika

This week's exirsise: "Loe läbi Raymondi Hacker-HOWTO ja kirjuta selle kohta hinnang."

The given article is interesting and and I would definitely recommend my friends reading it. Especially the part "What is a hacker?" should be read by everyone, who is somehow related to the IT field. In my childhood I thought that a hacker is a person who tries to break the code, write a virus. But I would never would have thought that this is a person who is capable of building an entirely new system. It was later that I discovered, that there is another similar type of person, named "cracker", who feel the urge to break the computer program. The rest of the parts should be given to the young ones or the ones who are making their first steps towards the computer world. 

All in all I enjoyed reading this article.

Tarkvara- ja sisulitsentsid

This weeks's exirsise: "Kirjeldage üht vaba litsentsi lähemalt (kust pärit, kes seda kasutavad, mis on eripärad jne)."
Today I will take a close look at the Apache Licence version 2.0. The Apache Licence is a free software licence, which was created by the Apache Software foundation in January 2004. This licence requires that copyright notice and the disclamer would be preserved.
The Apache License allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license. The licence, however,  does not require the user to release the software under the same licence. In every licensed file, any original copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices in redistributed code must be preserved. 
If the work includes the NOTICE file, then the derivatives must include a readable copy in one of the following places: in a NOTICE file or withing the source code of the derivative work.

Paragrahvi-papi ja Interneti-põnn: intellektuaalomandi hiilgus ja viletsus

This weeks's exirsise: "Kirjutage ajaveebi omapoolne hinnang autorikaitse ja intellektuaalomandi temaatika hetkeseisule."

This is quite a hard topic for me, for an IT guy. If I would want to create some software nowadays, then most probably something similar already exists. And most probably it is already copyrighted and somebody already owns the patents for it. Today it is quite hard to create something new and unique. Here are some examples from the IT field, proving that.

Apple vs Microsoft (year 1994). Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its GUI to Microsoft for use in Windows 1.0, but when Microsoft made changes in Windows 2.0 adding overlapping windows and other features found in the Macintosh GUI, Apple filed a suit. The court insisted on the analysis of the user interface of both operating systems. Apple listed 189 elements in the suit, but the court has decided that 179 of the elements were licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 release. Turned out , that the remaining 10 elements were not copyrightable.

Oracle vs Google (ongoing). In August 2010 Oracle has filed a lawsuit against a search-engine giant Google "for developing Android". Oracle insists  that Google has infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. The case has been going on for more than a year already, and it is still not clear if Google is guilty or not.
These examples are only a drop in the ocean compared to the million other patent suits. Today it is very hard to defend what is yours and to prove your authorship.

Vaba tarkvara

This weeks's exircise: "Kirjeldage ajaveebis enda kogemusi mõne vaba tarkvaratoote kasutamisega."

What is freeware? Freeware is a software that is available to use freely and at no extra cost. I will try to share my experiences with this typo of software.
OpenOffice. I remember my childhood, when I got a new computer, it had a lot of pre-installed software. Microsoft Office was one of it. It was a very good text editor for me , and helped me to do a lot of  stuff for school. But for some reasons, not understood by me then, it required some activation. To do that, i took me to some Microsoft page and required me to pay a considerable amount of money. Ofcource, that time I was not pay for it, so i started searching for something, that is completely free. I searched and searched, until I hit OpenOffice. It was an MS Office alternative, even though it offered a bit less functionality and had a little unusual interface. But for school purposes - creation of basic report, presentations, it was enough. Nowadays I still use it for work, but not as much. For personal stuff I use Google Docs, which is also free to use.
Gimp. Gimp is the free Photoshop. I remember, back in the days, when a lot of people used Photoshop to create cool pictures of themselves. I also wanted to try the cool software, but it also required some activation. Nowadays I do not do graphics editing that much. Gimp is the picture editor that mostly fits my needs.
Audacity. During work time, I needed to fix a couple of sounds for a game. It was unreasonable to wait for a couple of days until the sound designer would make the sound a couple of seconds shorter. So I asked a friend if he knew a sound editing software, that I could use without paying. His answer was - "use Audacity :)". So I followed his advice, and after a couple minutes the sounds were of needed length. The client was happy with them and the game itself turned out to be a big success.
These are the stories that I have so far.