There has been a growing interest among Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) projects in the use of crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and its myriad derivatives (hereinafter “Bitcoin”). However, uncertainty over the treatment of these currencies by US law has dissuaded developers from from using Bitcoin. This post provides some general guidance on the legal consequences of using such convertible virtual currency.
SFLC Blog: Posts tagged “technology”![[RSS]](../../../img/feed-icon-14x14.png)
We’ve been watching with great interest this week as the travails of FOSS organizations with the US Internal Revenue Service have become a hot topic. When our client, Jim Nelson of Yorba, discussed blogging about the IRS rejection of Yorba’s application for 501c3 status with us, we hoped but did not expect that the situation, to which we had discreetly called community and company attention for years, would finally receive some. We’re very glad that’s now happening. Unfortunately, it’s really too late. Because of the long delays in determination imposed by the IRS in its increasingly anti-FOSS positioning, neither the full consequences of the IRS’s present position nor the state of our legal technology in response can be seen from the materials currently under discussion.
In each Supreme Court brief that SFLC has filed over the years we have included a little note on the first page declaring that the brief was made using only free software. This point was particularly important in our most recent brief, for a case named Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank, which was argued in front of the court last week. Our use of free software was particularly important this time because we argue in our brief that free software has been responsible for the major software innovations of the modern era. In partial support of that claim I want to show you our document creation process and tell you about the free software we use to take text from an email and turn it into a camera-ready Supreme Court brief, then a website, then an eBook.
The Software Freedom Law Center is seeking legal, technology, and administrative interns for the summer of 2012.
SFLC is introducing our redesigned website today! We hope you like the new look. While the content is largely unaffected, we’ve made some improvements to the information design to make the content easier to access and understand. (Take a look at our new publications page for an example.) We also changed our default content license to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (formerly Attribution-NoDerivs).
stet repository converted to git and moved to gitorious
A (belated) blog post about the future of free software; making the movement more inclusive; and the Libre Planet Conference in Boston on May 19-21.
New York Times reporters John Markoff and Ashlee Vance correctly pointed out that “nations, private corporations, and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems,” by exploiting bugs in a program’s source code in their January 20th story, “Fearing Hackers Who Leave no Trace.”