In the closest thing we’ll see to a unanimous multi-partisan vote in any modern democracy, the European Parliament resolved that ACTA negotiations must be transparent, must be limited to existing EU law and must not make three-strikes and other sociopathic ideas mandatory. This is the first big obstacle to the secret corporate juggernaut that has been rolling to trade our freedoms for corporate profits and it’s fantastic news.
A complete browser-based collaborative meeting system, all built from open source components. I’m in the process of downloading and building it for my test server, but the demo makes it look ideal for community meetings like the GNOME Board, OpenSolaris Governing Board and OSI Board, all of which I’ve participated in and which have struggled to find a solution that is both free software and one-click-easy. This looks like it’s both.
Mitchell Baker announces the revision of the Mozilla Public License. This is a welcome development; if it had been done 7 years ago we wouldn’t have the CDDL today.
Great posting from the CEO of the company that runs WordPress on the benefits of a distributed organisation. Having been part of a distributed organisation myself I do wonder how well this scales; doing so certainly needs enlightened management.
This is an excellent motion, placing restraint on the ability of the European Commission to conduct opaque negotiations that will effectively bind the European parliament before they have been exposed and reviewed. Looking forward to reading the highlights of the debate. If you have a fast-track to your MEP, this is worth mentioning to them.
Jay with an explanation of why the whole Drizzle team (working on the refactoring of MySQL to suit cloud computing) has moved to Rackspace (a cloud computing supplier). Makes perfect sense to me.
§ I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.
European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 is now ready for signature. The Declaration establishes principles by which ACTA will be judged when it finally uncloaks and we discover how it is in fact armed. It’s time to use your preferred means to contact your MEPs and ask them to sign it.
Paul Carr with a relatively fair and balanced view of the Digital Economy Bill – seductively so. But I don’t agree with his conclusions.
While the social contract behind copyright has merit (creating a protected ‘space’ where a copyright creation can be monetised in exchange for its dedication to the public domain), the digital age has driven a switch from a control-centric (‘hub-and-spoke’) society to an emergiunbg peer-to-peer society. There are no ‘fixes’ we can do to copyright to make it work right; we need to start again and invent a copyright for the digitial age.
The Digital Economy Bill is well intentioned, but there are no fixes available to make analogue copyright law work for a digital society and I fear the Bill will just make things worse, unleashing a “sorcerer’s apprentice” effect of unintended consequences the way the US DMCA has done. The Bill has to be stopped, not patched.
Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence. Continue reading →
§ I’m still listening to new music and it seems the proximity of SXSW is triggering a cascade of releases. Here are some samples from this week’s listening.
The news here is actually that Disney has opened a new site to hold all its future open source projects. Disney doing open source has to be one of the signs of the end times.
Official statement from OSI denouncing the IIPA’s warped view of the world that says developing nations should not be mandating open source while the US states and federal agencies get right along with the same thing. Very welcome statement that I know we’ll see Open Source For America reacting to – I hope other countries will also flag the issue with their US diplomatic contacts.
Excellent paper from the EFF provides us with the lessons of history as the UK considers implementing similar bad legislation. It’s not so much the primary objectives of the law that are the problem (although those are pretty obnoxious). It’s the fact that, through careless drafting (or rather drafting with the assistance of the wrong lobbyists), a whole range of loopholes are created which lead to unintended consequences like censorship, anticompetitive litigation and early monopolisation. This really is a document I want my representatives to read.
“Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to http://www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.”
Wading into the “Special 301 list” debate I explored at great length last weekend, this posting introduces the great analogy of asking if the same complaints would apply if they related to an own vs rent model on cars instead of software: “But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be ‘distorting the market’ if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them.”
I usually do a best-of playlist for SXSW but this year I’ve not found the monster download of all the tracks. However, as second-best, NPR has seleted their top 100 tracks (that’s 10% of the festival) and put them online as streaming continuous-play radio.
Or, “how to ensure your customers can’t use your product and become ‘criminals'”. Great illustration of why “technical measures” are ridiculous and counter-productive.
The huge problem with the Digital Economy Bill – and one which I can’t help thinking is part of its design – is that it’s easy for attempts to fix it to be just as bad as the poison they are trying to fix, unless the fixes are very well thought through indeed. This is a case in point, where the opposition politicians are proposing amendments that sell our rights down the river too.
§ The last of the series of songs by Dave Carroll after his lousy experience flying United is finally out. I think song one was by far the best (song two lacked zing), but this one is pretty good:
I’d like to be able to say it’s hyperbolic, but unfortunately the trip I took over the weekend once again poured fuel on the fire (one friend I was travelling with had luggage lost by them on 2 of the last 3 flights) so sadly I think Carroll still has a point. Song one is just coming up to 8 million views on YouTube so I think United has a problem and the rest of us have a marketing case study.
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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