I pointed yesterday to an interesting comment about contributor agreements attached to a report about Michael Meeks speech a LPC. Another comment to the same article by Meeks himself casts light on another, much more serious issue for open source communities; bilateral agreements. Read on at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Governance | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 2 Comments »
The conversation around LWN’s coverage of Michael Meeks’ talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference (sadly paywalled until now but available today and worth reading all the way through) provoked interesting comments. The subject of the discussion is LibreOffice and the code ownership issues which provoked the fork. But what caught my eye was a comment [...]
Filed under: Governance | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 1 Comment »
Fair, Reasonable, Non-Discriminatory – surely that all has to be good stuff? RAND sounds so good. It shows up in the negotiation of licenses for patents that apply to standards, and it stands for “Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory“, excellent words that it’s hard to criticise. Sometimes it shows up as FRAND, with “Fair” in front making [...]
Filed under: Patents | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off
The move back to collaborative co-development of open source will characterise the next phase of the open source movement.
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 1 Comment »
I was pleased to be able to attend this year’s OSCON, O’Reilly Media’s open source convention held once again in Portland, Oregon in mid-July. There have been numerous reports about it, not least from the New York Times, but one that caught my eye was the meta-analysis from analyst Stephen O’Grady. O’Grady is characteristically detail-rich [...]
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | 2 Comments »
While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for jailbreaking iPhones is very welcome, the reaction has been just a touch too euphoric. There are two big reasons I’m only vaguely impressed. One concerns market power and its potential abuse, the other concerns global trade.
Filed under: ACTA, DRM | Tagged: Apple, ComputerWorldUK, DMCA, iPhone, Jailbreaking | 1 Comment »
The open core model is being feted as the new default open source business model. But I assert it does not deliver and sustain the principle that delivers cost savings and flexibility to the customer – software freedom. As a consequence, businesses who live-or-die by open core risk the fate of Compiere ERP unless they [...]
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off
In an unusual move for such a significant news item, the UK government announced over the weekend that they were ordering all government departments to embark on a voyage of transparency. There were some very good ideas in the announcement, including a mandate to publish details of all ITC procurements. And there is no doubt [...]
Filed under: ODF, Open Data | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK, Transparency | 3 Comments »
The announcement last week at Google IO of the creation of the WebM project and the release of the VP8 codec was a positive and welcome development, finally offering an alternative to the royalty-liable H.264 and to Theora. WebM arises from Google’s purchase of ON2 last year and had been widely anticipated. Google did their [...]
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK, WebM | 1 Comment »
Software freedom may sound like a line from a revolutionary manifesto, but it’s the key genetic marker for value in the enterprise. read more on my ComputerWorldUK blog…
Filed under: Links, Open Source | Tagged: ComputerWorldUK, Philosophy | Comments Off
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