☞ Changing Affilliation

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Simon Phipps
  • The Document Foundation joins OpenDoc Society
    Obvious (but still good) move by TDF as it continues its rapid voyage through respectability and on to leadership.

  • GNOME Foundation is hiring!
    Not a surprise that they would be looking for a new Executive Director now that Stormy has moved on to Mozilla. Tempting though it is, I’m too committed to ForgeRock to do this at the moment, so one of you will have to do it 🙂

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☝ Google, Chrome and H.264 – Far From Hypocritical

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps

When Google announced yesterday that they were withdrawing from their Chrome browser embedded support in the HTML5 <video> tag for the H.264 encoding standard, there was immediate reaction. While some of it was either badly informed views by people who can’t handle indirect causality or astroturf trolling by competitors, some of it was well-observed. For example, when they said:

“Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable
open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources
directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

they indicated that a motivation was to only use “completely open” technologies in Chrome. Yet they did not mention Adobe’s proprietary Flash system, designed for embedded media programming yet definitely not “completely open” even by Adobe’s special definitions of the word.

Continue reading on ComputerWorldUK…

Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

☞ Hudson and Jenkins

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
  • Hudson’s future | Hudson Labs
    After making a valiant attempt to negotiate an amicable outcome with Oracle, the Hudson community may well decide to rename itself Jenkins, move off Oracle infrastructure and build open governance underwritten by the Software Conservancy. Naturally Oracle will still be able to participate and co-develop the code it’s using for java.net within the Jenkins community (they are even invited onto the leadership team) but the one thing open source communities cannot and should not tolerate is a participant that regards itself as worthy of extra rights that are beyond question.

Also:

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☞ Public Information

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Simon Phipps

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☞ Educational

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Simon Phipps
  • School’s in for open source advocates
    Excellent initiative that deserves to be emulated all over the world. If you have any kind of meeting spaces at your company, you could run a similar event for local teenagers in your area.

  • MariaDB Trademark Policy
    The proposed trademark policy for MariaDB is worth reading; they are keen to receive comments. Despite the policy being very well balanced, it lacks a matching implementation document to make all the statements have concrete consequences. Take a look and add comments for them.

  • Egypt’s Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as “human shields”
    Truly moving actions from people pushed to their limits by the evil of fanatics full of religion but empty of God.

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✈ Light In The Dark

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps

Apologies for the silence over the weekend – we’ve been taking a break in Helsinki. Because of it being the darkest part of the year, the city has a week-long night-time festival of light-related art installations, Season of Light, now in its third year. It’s not unlike the “nuit blanche” I saw in Paris earlier in the year, but the 0ºC temperatures and falling sleet onto packed snow made the crowds a little smaller! We were able to tour the closing evening of the 2011 festival, walking snow-covered streets and encountering ambient music and shifting colourscapes.

Cathedral Light Show

One  favourite was the stunning LED-lit cross in front of the cathedral, which showed a blazingly colourful sequence of abstract images accompanied by rich and full ambient music, shifting strong colours cast onto the building and the snow-field around it and candle-lights in all the windows of the buildings in the square surrounding it. You’ll find more and better photos of the installation at the cathedral on the event’s Facebook page.

Another was the fire dancing, held in a building courtyard north of the cathedral. Full of energy and gentle humour, the agile fire-juggling dancers were clearly having great fun despite the sleet falling on them and were warmly appreciated.

Filed under: Travel | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

☞ Organic Consequences

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Simon Phipps

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☞ Ubuntu Picks LibreOffice

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Simon Phipps

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☂ Copyrights vs Human Rights

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Simon Phipps

My article on how human rights trump copyrights is now available in the Essays section. It has also been republished at OpenSource.Com.

Filed under: ACTA, Copyright, Issues, Webmink | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

☞ Two Approaches To Patents

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Simon Phipps
  • The Ultimate Patent Troll Patent: Get Sued When You File A Patent
    You almost never hear about IBM’s patent shakedowns (and there are many of them) because former VP Marshall Phelps (now at Microsoft) invented such an efficient machine for doing it that victims rarely attempt to publicly defend themselves. Looks like they have now patented the process itself in this curious business method meta-patent.

  • Useful reference point for information about the progress of ACTA, worth bookmarking.

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    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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