The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory Very interesting article. The practice of “legal blackmail” extends further than this, of course. That would also be an excellent description of the use to which software patents are put by their owners. While geeks across Europe are comforted by the fact that there are no [...]
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LibreOffice – A fresh page for OpenOffice This is a good and balanced article that is worth reading. At Sun I tried several times to get a Foundation started for OpenOffice.org and it had to happen in the end. Today was the day that the OpenOffice.org community (apart, significantly, from the Oracle-owned team in Hamburg) [...]
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
I have been travelling this week on Europe’s low-cost airlines, and have realised that there is only one way to make air travel secure, and that is to take security seriously and prioritise it above all other factors. We should learn from the most secure flights to date – operated by the US military for [...]
Filed under: Travel | Tagged: Humour | 4 Comments »
My classic (read: several years old) essay on Payment At The Point Of Value has finally made it on to the Essays page on this site. Now that community-centric open source is once again returning to centre stage, PPV is a relevant concept to understand the roles different community members play in relation to the [...]
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Business Models, Essays, Motivation | Comments Off
Meet the Defenders of Open-Source Software I can't decide whether I am pleased there are people doing this or concerned that their actions become the focus of public understanding about open source software. Not all software is GPL licensed. MIT/BSD/X11/Apache probably lead the pack for integrated/embedded software (by definition there can be no hard data) [...]
Filed under: Links, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought It turns out that software publishers really don’t like copyright law alone. It gives their customers far too many rights – in this case “first sale” rights – and they would much rather use contracts that avoid giving any rights similar to ownership. Doing so allows [...]
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BSA’s Piracy Numbers: Less than They Seem Glyn’s research here is very useful. The BSA use of statistics is very regrettable, as is their use of inuendo and framing to build the impression that their outlook is correct. They are a vestige of a passing business model and everything they say should be questioned and [...]
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My essay on copyright aggregation in open source projects has finally moved to the Essays section of the web site; future updates and edits will happen there.
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Twitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost? Jon Udell argues that the switch to OAuth comes at the cost of a loss of flexibility and the potential for innovation. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention the other problem – the impact on open source software. A New Home for the WordPress Trademark Excellent approach to [...]
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My essay on Community Types is now available in the Essays section of the site. It defines what I mean by terms like “co-developer” and “deployer-developer” when I use them in conversation.
Filed under: Governance, Webmink | Tagged: Essays | Comments Off
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