1.
Compact disc
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Compact disc is a digital optical disc data storage format released in 1982 and co-developed by Philips and Sony. The format was developed to store and play only sound recordings but was later adapted for storage of data. The first commercially available Audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan, standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres and can hold up to about 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or about 700 MiB of data. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres, they are used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio. At the time of the introduction in 1982, a CD could store much more data than a personal computer hard drive. By 2010, hard drives commonly offered as much space as a thousand CDs. In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs reached about 30 billion discs, by 2007,200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. In 2014, revenues from digital music services matched those from physical format sales for the first time. American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record information on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russells patent application was first filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970, following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russells patents in the 1980s. The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s, although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980, after their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984, by 1988 CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes. The success of the disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, who came together to agree upon and develop compatible hardware. The unified design of the disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company. In 1974, L. However, due to the performance of the analog format
2.
Cover art
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Cover art it is either an artwork as illustration or photograph on the outside of a published product such as a book, magazine, comic book, video game, DVD, CD, videotape, or music album. Album cover art is created for a music album. Iconic album cover art includes Pink Floyds The Dark Side of the Moon, King Crimsons In the Court of the Crimson King, peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road and their White Album among others. Artists known for their cover art include Alex Steinweiss, an early pioneer in album cover art, Roger Dean. Some album art may cause controversy because of nudity, offending churches, there have been numerous books documenting album cover art, particularly rock and jazz album covers. Alex Steinweiss was an art director and graphic designer who brought custom artwork to record album covers, magazine cover artists include Art Spiegelman, who modernized the look of The New Yorker magazine, and his predecessor Rea Irvin, who created the Eustace Tilly iconic character for the magazine. Sheet music cover artists include Frederick S. Manning, William Austin Starmer, other prolific artists included Albert Wilfred Barbelle, André De Takacs, and Gene Buck
3.
Internet Archive
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The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes, in addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures, the Archive also oversees one of the worlds largest book digitization projects. Founded by Brewster Kahle in May 1996, the Archive is a 501 nonprofit operating in the United States. It has a budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources, revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees work, Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond, the Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007. Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at around the time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, the archived content wasnt available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of projects, the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It. According to its web site, Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture, without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form, the Archives mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for over 1.3 million existing files, on November 6,2013, the Internet Archives headquarters in San Franciscos Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage, in November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the archive to be based somewhere in the country of Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build an archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Kahle was quoted as saying that on November 9th in America and it was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions
4.
Amazon (company)
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Amazon. com, also called Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company that was founded on July 5,1994, by Jeff Bezos and is based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales, the company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo—and is the worlds largest provider of cloud infrastructure services. Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics. Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to other countries for some of its products. In 2016, Dutch, Polish, and Turkish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization, in 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co. a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a plan for what would eventually become Amazon. com. Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra on July 5,1994, Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as cadaver. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless. com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, the domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon. com in 1995, Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, Theres nothing about our model that cant be copied over time. But you know, McDonalds got copied, and it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name, brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world. Additionally, a beginning with A was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized. Since June 19,2000, Amazons logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile. After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2, 300% and he narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included, compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos and books. Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos home in Bellevue, the company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book, along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon. Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram, in the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries
5.
Creative Commons
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Creative Commons is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public and these licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, Wikipedia uses one of these licenses. The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, the first article in a general interest publication about Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in February 2002. The first set of licenses was released in December 2002. In 2003 the Open Content Project, a 1998 precursor project by David A. Wiley, announced the Creative Commons as successor project, matthew Haughey and Aaron Swartz also played a role in the early stages of the project. As of January 2016 there were an estimated 1.1 billion works licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses, as of March 2015, Flickr alone hosts over 306 million Creative Commons licensed photos. Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors and their licenses have been embraced by many as a way for creators to take control of how they choose to share their copyrighted works. Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment, Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. Lessig describes this as a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, as of 2017, they are Paul Keller, Jonathan Nightingale, Chris Thorne. As of 2015, there are more than 100 affiliates working in over 75 jurisdictions to support, Creative Commons Korea is the affiliated network of Creative Commons in South Korea. In March 2005, CC Korea was initiated by Jongsoo Yoon, the major Korean portal sites, including Daum and Naver, have been participating in the use of Creative Commons licences. In January 2009, the Creative Commons Korea Association was consequently founded as an incorporated association. Since then, CC Korea has been promoting the liberal. Since March 15,2012 he has been detained by the Syrian government in Damascus at Adra Prison, on October 17,2015 Creative Commons Board of Directors approved a resolution calling for Bassel Khartabil release. All current CC licenses require attribution, which can be inconvenient for works based on other works. Critics also worried that the lack of rewards for content producers will dissuade artists from publishing their work, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig countered that copyright laws have not always offered the strong and seemingly indefinite protection that todays law provides
6.
Barcelona
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Founded as a Roman city, in the Middle Ages Barcelona became the capital of the County of Barcelona. Barcelona has a cultural heritage and is today an important cultural centre. Particularly renowned are the works of Antoni Gaudí and Lluís Domènech i Montaner. The headquarters of the Union for the Mediterranean is located in Barcelona, the city is known for hosting the 1992 Summer Olympics as well as world-class conferences and expositions and also many international sport tournaments. It is a cultural and economic centre in southwestern Europe, 24th in the world. In 2008 it was the fourth most economically powerful city by GDP in the European Union, in 2012 Barcelona had a GDP of $170 billion, it is leading Spain in both employment rate and GDP per capita change. In 2009 the city was ranked Europes third and one of the worlds most successful as a city brand, since 2011 Barcelona has been a leading smart city in Europe. During the Middle Ages, the city was known as Barchinona, Barçalona, Barchelonaa. Internationally, Barcelonas name is abbreviated to Barça. However, this refers only to FC Barcelona, the football club. The common abbreviated form used by locals is Barna, another common abbreviation is BCN, which is also the IATA airport code of the Barcelona-El Prat Airport. The city is referred to as the Ciutat Comtal in Catalan. The origin of the earliest settlement at the site of present-day Barcelona is unclear, the ruins of an early settlement have been excavated in the El Raval neighbourhood, including different tombs and dwellings dating to earlier than 5000 BC. The founding of Barcelona is the subject of two different legends, the first attributes the founding of the city to the mythological Hercules. In about 15 BC, the Romans redrew the town as a castrum centred on the Mons Taber, under the Romans, it was a colony with the surname of Faventia, or, in full, Colonia Faventia Julia Augusta Pia Barcino or Colonia Julia Augusta Faventia Paterna Barcino. It enjoyed immunity from imperial burdens, the city minted its own coins, some from the era of Galba survive. Some remaining fragments of the Roman walls have incorporated into the cathedral. The cathedral, also known as the Basilica La Seu, is said to have founded in 343
7.
MacOS
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Within the market of desktop, laptop and home computers, and by web usage, it is the second most widely used desktop OS after Microsoft Windows. Launched in 2001 as Mac OS X, the series is the latest in the family of Macintosh operating systems, Mac OS X succeeded classic Mac OS, which was introduced in 1984, and the final release of which was Mac OS9 in 1999. An initial, early version of the system, Mac OS X Server 1.0, was released in 1999, the first desktop version, Mac OS X10.0, followed in March 2001. In 2012, Apple rebranded Mac OS X to OS X. Releases were code named after big cats from the release up until OS X10.8 Mountain Lion. Beginning in 2013 with OS X10.9 Mavericks, releases have been named after landmarks in California, in 2016, Apple rebranded OS X to macOS, adopting the nomenclature that it uses for their other operating systems, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The latest version of macOS is macOS10.12 Sierra, macOS is based on technologies developed at NeXT between 1985 and 1997, when Apple acquired the company. The X in Mac OS X and OS X is pronounced ten, macOS shares its Unix-based core, named Darwin, and many of its frameworks with iOS, tvOS and watchOS. A heavily modified version of Mac OS X10.4 Tiger was used for the first-generation Apple TV, Apple also used to have a separate line of releases of Mac OS X designed for servers. Beginning with Mac OS X10.7 Lion, the functions were made available as a separate package on the Mac App Store. Releases of Mac OS X from 1999 to 2005 can run only on the PowerPC-based Macs from the time period, Mac OS X10.5 Leopard was released as a Universal binary, meaning the installer disc supported both Intel and PowerPC processors. In 2009, Apple released Mac OS X10.6 Snow Leopard, in 2011, Apple released Mac OS X10.7 Lion, which no longer supported 32-bit Intel processors and also did not include Rosetta. All versions of the system released since then run exclusively on 64-bit Intel CPUs, the heritage of what would become macOS had originated at NeXT, a company founded by Steve Jobs following his departure from Apple in 1985. There, the Unix-like NeXTSTEP operating system was developed, and then launched in 1989 and its graphical user interface was built on top of an object-oriented GUI toolkit using the Objective-C programming language. This led Apple to purchase NeXT in 1996, allowing NeXTSTEP, then called OPENSTEP, previous Macintosh operating systems were named using Arabic numerals, e. g. Mac OS8 and Mac OS9. The letter X in Mac OS Xs name refers to the number 10 and it is therefore correctly pronounced ten /ˈtɛn/ in this context. However, a common mispronunciation is X /ˈɛks/, consumer releases of Mac OS X included more backward compatibility. Mac OS applications could be rewritten to run natively via the Carbon API, the consumer version of Mac OS X was launched in 2001 with Mac OS X10.0. Reviews were variable, with praise for its sophisticated, glossy Aqua interface
8.
Threshold of originality
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The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not. In this context, originality refers to coming from someone as the originator/author, 94-1476 states that the design of a typeface cannot be protected under U. S. law. The non-eligibility of textual matter was raised in Ets-Hokin v. Skyy Spirits Inc and it is essentially a functional bottle without a distinctive shape. Although a labels graphical illustrations are normally copyrightable, textual matter is not—at least not unless the text aid or augment an accompanying graphical illustration, the label on Skyys vodka bottle consists only of text and does not include any pictorial illustrations. In works produced in a medium, “there is broad scope for copyright. This appears to mean that a human created the work, using the requisite creativity, in a work made through a completely mechanical process, copyright might be denied on the basis that no one was the author. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment posited that the question is open as to whether computers are unlike other tools of creation in that they are possible of being co-creators. Copyright Office has taken the position that in order to be entitled to copyright registration, works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable. Security cameras, webcams, camera traps and other pre-positioned recording devices capture whatever happens to take place in their field of view and this raises the question whether their recordings are an original and therefore copyrighted work. For example, f a security camera mounted in a lobby, recording 24 hours a day, captured a dramatic event, to date, this question remains untested in the United States. One 2008 United States district court case, Southwest Casino and Hotel Corp. vs Flyingman would have been on point had the case ever been heard, the casino filed suit for copyright infringement on the use of their surveillance video. The defendant argued in a motion that the surveillance video lacked the sufficient creativity needed to secure copyright protection and that argument never got its day in court, instead, the case fell apart when a separate tribal court ruled that the tribes owned the footage – not the casino. Under New Zealand law, according to Susy Frankel, A plaintiff could argue that the placing of the camera and possibly even its operation involved skill, judgment. These are the hallmarks of the test of originality for the subsistence of copyright, the counterargument would be that these skills alone are not enough because if they were it would allow a very low threshold of originality. Frankel concludes that, under New Zealand law, a security camera film may not reach the requisite originality threshold, al Fayed and his privately held security company filed suit, alleging, among other things, infringement of copyright. In that case, Hyde Park Residence Ltd v. Ultimately, such authorless films may have no copyright at all. In the law of continental European countries, according to Pascal Kamina, Russian copyright law specifically exempts purely informational reports on events and facts from protection, and security camera footage is not considered a work of authorship
9.
ICANN
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ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the central Internet address pools and DNS root zone registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function contract. The numbering facilities ICANN manages include the Internet Protocol address spaces for IPv4 and IPv6, ICANN also maintains registries of Internet Protocol identifiers. ICANN was created on September 18,1998, and incorporated on September 30,1998 and it is headquartered in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles. In 1997 Postel testified before Congress that this had come about as a task to this research work. The Information Sciences Institute was funded by the U. S. Department of Defense, as was SRI Internationals Network Information Center, which also performed some assigned name functions. As the Internet grew and expanded globally, the U. S. Department of Commerce initiated a process to establish a new organization to perform the IANA functions. The proposed rule making, or Green Paper, was published in the Federal Register on February 20,1998, NTIA received more than 650 comments as of March 23,1998, when the comment period closed. ICANN was formed in response to this policy, ICANN managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority under contract to the United States Department of Commerce and pursuant to an agreement with the IETF. ICANN was incorporated in California on September 30,1998, with entrepreneur and it is a nonprofit public benefit corporation organized under the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law for charitable and public purposes. ICANN was established in California due to the presence of Jon Postel, ICANN formerly operated from the same Marina del Rey building where Postel formerly worked, which is home to an office of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. However, ICANNs headquarters is now located in the nearby Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles and they were also required to be financially independent from ICANN. On July 26,2006, the United States government renewed the contract with ICANN for performance of the IANA function for a one to five years. The context of ICANNs relationship with the U. S. government was clarified on September 29,2006 when ICANN signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with the United States Department of Commerce and this document gave the DOC oversight over some of the ICANN operations. During July 2008, the DOC reiterated a statement that it has no plans to transition management of the authoritative root zone file to ICANN. The letter also stresses the separate roles of the IANA and VeriSign, on September 30,2009, ICANN signed an agreement with the DOC that confirmed ICANNs commitment to a multistakeholder governance model, but did not remove it from DOC oversight and control. On March 10,2016, ICANN and the DOC signed a historic, culminating agreement to finally remove ICANN and IANA from the control, on October 1,2016, ICANN was freed from U. S. government oversight. During September and October 2003, ICANN played a role in the conflict over VeriSigns wild card DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter from ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, later endorsed by the Internet Architecture Board, after this action, VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN on February 27,2004, claiming that ICANN had exceeded its authority
10.
Public domain
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The term public domain has two senses of meaning. Anything published is out in the domain in the sense that it is available to the public. Once published, news and information in books is in the public domain, in the sense of intellectual property, works in the public domain are those whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Examples for works not covered by copyright which are therefore in the domain, are the formulae of Newtonian physics, cooking recipes. Examples for works actively dedicated into public domain by their authors are reference implementations of algorithms, NIHs ImageJ. The term is not normally applied to situations where the creator of a work retains residual rights, as rights are country-based and vary, a work may be subject to rights in one country and be in the public domain in another. Some rights depend on registrations on a basis, and the absence of registration in a particular country, if required. Although the term public domain did not come into use until the mid-18th century, the Romans had a large proprietary rights system where they defined many things that cannot be privately owned as res nullius, res communes, res publicae and res universitatis. The term res nullius was defined as not yet appropriated. The term res communes was defined as things that could be enjoyed by mankind, such as air, sunlight. The term res publicae referred to things that were shared by all citizens, when the first early copyright law was first established in Britain with the Statute of Anne in 1710, public domain did not appear. However, similar concepts were developed by British and French jurists in the eighteenth century, instead of public domain they used terms such as publici juris or propriété publique to describe works that were not covered by copyright law. The phrase fall in the domain can be traced to mid-nineteenth century France to describe the end of copyright term. In this historical context Paul Torremans describes copyright as a coral reef of private right jutting up from the ocean of the public domain. Because copyright law is different from country to country, Pamela Samuelson has described the public domain as being different sizes at different times in different countries. According to James Boyle this definition underlines common usage of the public domain and equates the public domain to public property. However, the usage of the public domain can be more granular. Such a definition regards work in copyright as private property subject to fair use rights, the materials that compose our cultural heritage must be free for all living to use no less than matter necessary for biological survival
11.
GNU General Public License
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The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. The GPL is a license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free licenses, of which the BSD licenses. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use, historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software domain. Prominent free software licensed under the GPL include the Linux kernel. In 2007, the version of the license was released to address some perceived problems with the second version that were discovered during its long-time usage. To keep the license up to date, the GPL license includes an optional any later version clause, developers can omit it when licensing their software, for instance the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 without the any later version clause. The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, for use with programs released as part of the GNU project, the original GPL was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger and the GNU C Compiler. These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program, rendering them incompatible, Stallmans goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible for many projects to share code. The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991, version 3 was developed to attempt to address these concerns and was officially released on 29 June 2007. Version 1 of the GNU GPL, released on 25 February 1989, the first problem was that distributors may publish binary files only—executable, but not readable or modifiable by humans. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that any vendor distributing binaries must also make the source code available under the same licensing terms. The second problem was that distributors might add restrictions, either to the license, the union of two sets of restrictions would apply to the combined work, thus adding unacceptable restrictions. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that modified versions, as a whole, had to be distributed under the terms in GPLv1. Therefore, software distributed under the terms of GPLv1 could be combined with software under more permissive terms, according to Richard Stallman, the major change in GPLv2 was the Liberty or Death clause, as he calls it – Section 7. The section says that licensees may distribute a GPL-covered work only if they can all of the licenses obligations. In other words, the obligations of the license may not be severed due to conflicting obligations and this provision is intended to discourage any party from using a patent infringement claim or other litigation to impair users freedom under the license
12.
KDE
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KDE is an international free software community that develops Free and Libre software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and a range of applications designed to run on modern Unix-like. It further provides tools and documentation for developers that enables them to write software and this supporting role makes KDE a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita or digiKam. The Plasma Desktop, being one of the most recognized projects of KDE, is the desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Chakra, Kubuntu. It was also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, but was replaced with Lumina. The work of the KDE community can be measured in the following figures, more than 1800 contributors participate in developing KDE software. About 20 new developers contribute their first code each month, KDE Software consists of over 6 million lines of code. KDE Software is translated in over 108 languages, KDE Software is available on more than 114 official FTP mirrors in over 34 countries. A read-only mirror of all repositories can be found on Github, K Desktop Environment was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop, among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this easy to use, one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born, the name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE is an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM and it was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for Kool, but it was decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to K Desktop Environment before it was dropped altogether in favor of KDE = Community due to the rebranding effort. The rebranding focused on de-emphasizing the desktop environment as just another product, what would have been previously known as KDE4 was split into three products, Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform – bundled as KDE Software Compilation 4. As of today the name KDE no longer stands for K Desktop Environment, the financial and legal matters of KDE are handled by KDE e. V
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