The answer is actually rather complex.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

Will the French be forced to use Internet Explorer (bearing in mind that Opera is now free)? I am not sure what the motive of the government actually is, but I can only speculate. Perhaps it is shielding people’s jobs — primarily in the software industry, that is. Maybe it is the realisation of that DRM and the like suffer from OSS (if not vice versa).

Clarifications soon emerged in a newsgroup that I regularly read (posted by 7):

What they are trying to say is that a new law passed in France will allow those that publish any software to access protected content will face prosecution from those that are harmed by that software. Because any software can become a target, even free software is also a target.

It seems fatally flawed, because you could publish it as two separate modules and have the thing working only when they are brought together by the user as happens now with certain codecs.

In any case, the whole world is running away from DRM because it denies mind share and contributes to elimination of public interest in a companies product, and thus eliminate their revenue!

The day is coming when DRM is burned along side the word hate in the public’s mind.

And nobody will want to touch it and instead opt to go with sharing friendly companies that allows media to be downloaded and stored permanently and transferrably on hard disks and players.

In other (and better) news, the 2008 Olympic Games aim for an Open Source migration.

Contextually-related : No Software Patents in Europe

When names collide

ACK in 2002, I chose to work on a project which dealt with the game Othello, also known as Reversi. To put rigour into development, I chose a name for it. I did so without paying much thought to any future potential. A careful and exhaustive investigation of name collisions simply did not seem worthwhile at the time.

Having searched the Web at a shallow level, I did not know of any name collisions when I chose the title “Othello Master”. I even explained about the choice of the name in my report and proposal. It refelects on the way I viewed the choice of the name at that time:

This project has been set to produce an application which will be titled Othello Master due to some visual similarity to an older game called Chess Master. It will require knowledge of game theory and advanced computer graphics.

The name was therefore conceived in a most innocent way. It was only less than a year ago that I became aware of a name collision, for which I am to blame. Search engines had revealed a game from the mid-eighties, which suddenly resurfaced in results from archival pages. It ran on the Amiga, but perhaps on other platforms too.

I sometimes wonder if I should get a hold of this game and play it. Mine is Open Source and GPL‘d so no-one is prevented from playing it for free. In fact, the downloads page is always there for those interested. As for the number of downloads, I believe it itches 1,000, but I rarely keep track of the numbers. It can run on all platforms and there is even a Windows executable.

Other items on Othello Master:

• Collaboration Sought
• OM Gets a Home

I have recently been thinking about extending a project of mine, Othello Master, to form a new project. The new project will take a different title and occupy a different domain. Chess, Checkers and the like can be considered. If you would like to be a part of this, please send me an E-mail because without somebody’s collaboration, I don’t plan on doing it.

My game/program Othello Master has just been moved to its independent new domain. You can now find it at othellomaster.com.