Does anybody have experience of these so called paper screens on a tablet, here's an example but there are lots about now:
Is this similar to e-ink displays, like my very old kindle?
Yes. You can get colour e-ink displays now. Although the colours are more 'comic book' than 'glossy magazine'
The animated clips on that website are weird though. It seems like they've been filmed in a super grainy way so that the background to them appears grainy as well as the tablet display. That's not a good way to see how grainy or otherwise their product is.
Theo
I run FBreader on my phone, laptop and desktop computers. All are fine as I can adjust text size...
E-ink is only really useful if you want ultra low battery life, but if you are running android I am not sure a normal screen is the worst of your power eaters...
"It was formerly free software under the GPL, but since 2015 (v2.7) is proprietary software.[4]"
How does that work? Can I grab some public domain software and make it proprietary?
Yes to open source software (not quite the same as public domain), with the agreement of all copyright holders since first release, which may involve money changing hands. You can just try selling public domain software, as copyright has been renounced, but you cannot prevent it from remaining public domain.
Of course, if you do take an open source project out of GPL, nothing stops anyone from taking the last open source version and continuing its development as 'something else' (forking).
Many free software projects have gained restricted licences, and usually the free version was continued under another name e.g when Mozilla copyrighted their names and logos, and Debian continued to supply the free software under another name and with another logo. We now have MariaDB because of restrictive licensing of MySQL.
The copyright holder(s) can dual license work they own the copyright for. That doesn't prevent people sharing or making changes to the GPL sources, but the copyright owner can decide to make changes that they apply a proprietary licence to, and which aren't covered by the GPL. If they decide from now on all their changes will be proprietary, the GPL codebase will still exist as an older version under the GPL but won't benefit from any of the owner's later changes.
You can't grab somebody else's software and make it proprietary, but you can make your own software proprietary if you so wish.
Theo
Probably I haven't paid for it ever.
Well, that depends, what you mean.
AIUI, you can grab somebody else's software and use it to make a proprietary product. This is effectively what people do when they use a FOSS library (with a permissive licence) for a commercial product.
You can't make their software proprietary. If it's licenced to you under a permissive licence, you have to keep it under that permissive licence. Without the copyright holder's approval you can't change the licence.
What you can do is incorporate it into your product (eg by compiling it and shipping binaries) and you don't have to release the source code of it or any changes unless the licence says you do. Unlike the GPL, the binaries can be under a different licence to the source code.
Theo
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required