Posted on July 6, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Lovely Woot piece today, pointing out that if Woot quoted AP the way AP quoted Woot, they would demand payment. AP’s position is ridiculous becuase it assumes AP is in some way a different class of publisher to the rest of us. Rather hoping Woot don’t let it rest here…
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I never upgraded my Nokia phones for exactly this reason. I hope Nokia is getting the message; this is exactly the same issue that made Debian and Ubuntu superior to old-fashioned Unix. Package management is the killer app for mobile devices, at least it is for now.
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This seems to be the “open core of open data” and it’s so obviously wrong that we need to make a huge fuss about it here in the UK.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Easy Access
Posted on July 5, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Pamela picks up both my article and Mark’s and asks the obvious question. For the record, Mark is wrong to assert that I think only copyleft licenses are proper open source licenses. As for the “what does freedom mean” question Pamela is asking, that one will run and run and is at the root of the division between the BSD-ish and GPL-ish approaches.
- Open Core Is Not A Crime
“I appreciate why advocates of software freedom are wary of open core. It does perpetuate proprietary software licensing, and it does so via open source. But that does not make it a crime. And a considerable amount of code has been contributed to the commons by open core vendors. Meanwhile even those that would wish to do something to remedy the situation are without the means to do so. Hence the endless and futile debate.”
Filed under: Links, Open Source | Comments Off on ☞ For A Topic That’s A “Futile Debate”, A Lot Of People Seem Interested
Posted on July 4, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Important explanation of why the patent thicket around video formats on the internet is a threat to both democracy and innovation. Worth your time to read this.
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I am totally amazed this was not already the policy.
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“We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as if it “gets more bars”. That decision has now bitten us on our ass.”
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I remember Monty telling me that a major motivation for his own business ventures was to ensure the MySQL community was able to retain key members rtaher than having them move to competitors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Each new venture makes that goal more achievable. Project continuity is turning out to be proven value of the open source model.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 1, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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I hope to be able to participate in this activity, if only to ensure that it does not become a validation for the practice of using “contributor agreements” by corporations “hosting” open source projects. Contributor agreements are bad for communities, because they give one community member more rights than everyone else. They are perhaps justifiable if the entity aggregating everyone’s copyright is acting on behalf of the whole community democratically (such as a non-profit foundation), but otherwise they are the genetic marker for a community with issues.
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One explanation for the significant Amazon down-time on Tuesday could be that they were switching from S3 to S4 as their storage technology. Possibly successfully.
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Mårten Mickos responds to my criticisms of open core in a thoughtful posting.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Another Harmony
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