Posted on April 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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But the observation that I found most telling was that the governance model has actually freed up blockages in the decision-making processes. This is despite initial concerns expressed by some project members that a governance model could be unnecessary bureaucracy.
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I’m on a panel at OSBC this year. It’s the first time I’ve been back to OSBC for ages – if you’ll be in San Francisco that week let me know.
- Autocompletion brings liability
Seems that now Google has agreed to fix search results for China, the Gulf states and others, the capability is established and they will need to also fix them for anyone else who takes offence at the roll of the dice and can afford a hot lawyer.
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If you had any connection with the BBS movement in the heady days before the endemic Internet, you’ll know about Kermit. Columbia has finally decided it’s not a viable business and by the looks of it they are considering making it open source – excellent choice.
- Festival Bell: Fairport Convention
Fairport are still going strong four decades on, and this new studio album is pretty good, with strong tracks written by Chris Leslie and
Ralph McTell and other good stuff too. Makes me want to go to
Cropredy again…
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Freedom and Long Life
Posted on April 10, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Pamela declares victory, resists the temptation to diversify and announces Groklaw will no longer publish original articles. Personally I think this is a great loss for the wider software freedom community; an investigative community venue is definitely needed to counter the mesh of conspiracies I know are the daily work of industry lobbyists and standards professionals.
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The OSI Board has now elected officers and committee chairs for the 2011-12 year.
Filed under: Links | 3 Comments »
Posted on April 8, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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- 5th Annual North Bridge Future of Open Source Survey 2011
The forces of commercialism in open source would love you to share your insights in this annual survey.
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The move by the new masters in Congress to de-fund all the things in the US that have been recently installed to create more transparency speaks as well of their effectiveness as it does badly of those trying to use budget cuts as an excuse to remove them.
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Jomar observes that the companies previously excited about open standards have significantly cooled their passions lately. My assumption is that’s because Google is now seen as the primary threat vector by those companies and Google is well able to use both open standards and open source to its advantage.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Open Source Data Points
Posted on April 7, 2011 by Simon Phipps
- The end of OpenID?
Very interesting analysis on LWN suggesting that OpenID’s big problem is it leaves users in too much control and thus is no use to web sites who insist on quietly gathering and exploiting your identity information.
- Keen on Kyrgyzstan
Beautifully-written blog by Dennis Keen, who has the unbelievable task of studying eagle hunting in Asia on a Fulbright Fellowship. Read especially his fascinating Eagle Babe article from last November.
- EU’s new copyright leader doesn’t believe private copying should exist
The worrying appointment of Maria Martin-Prat as head of the European Union’s “intellectual property” unit. The unit itself is a pretty worrying thing to exist when there’s so little in common between copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets apart from their collective role in removing citizen freedoms in the digital age). But her appointment is especially worrying as she used to be a lobbyist for the recording industry, so this is an act of putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Distracting Reading
Posted on April 5, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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While it’s not instantly obvious from Mitchell’s blog posting, which verges on concealment in plain sight, the deal here is that the Mozilla spin-out to make Thunderbird as dynamic as Firefox hasn’t worked and the project is being folded back into Mozilla Labs. A great shame, because the e-mail market needs disrupting now more than ever. It would be interesting to see an honest appraisal from David Ascher of why it didn’t work out.
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Australia has always been a leader in the area of updating their government procurement policies to permit open source solutions. Here they are asking for input on an update to the existing policy.
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The attacks Google faces from all round (Oracle already, and the CPTN consortium members soon one presumes) mean it feels the need to buy an instant patent portfolio with which to defend itself. Understandable, but with great power comes great responsibility; I hope they will give a patent grant to the open source community to prevent future mishaps if they turn evil after all.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Spin-Policy-Defense
Posted on April 4, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This looks bad. Not only has Nokia closed the source code to Symbian, it is pretending there’s no problem. I really hope they fix this fast.
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This detailed article makes for worrying reading. It details a growing approach to hacking attacks where specific individuals with privileged access to data are targeted for socially engineered attacks and then their computers quietly infested as a gateway to secure systems.
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The revision of the Mozilla license is drawing to a close. The most recent significant change – making GPL compatibility the default rather than an option – is especially exciting. In my view it makes MPLv2 an excellent license choice for those preferring a less prescriptive approach to software freedom yet still wanting to live at peace with those with a more prescriptive – or proscriptive – outlook.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on April 1, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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The biggest threat to your privacy is not the disclosure of any one piece of data. It’s triangulation across all the data you’re disclosing. This piece of software is more performance art or prophecy than bad-faith threat, but it’s definitely a wake-up call to us all to be aware of the data we are all scattering across the web and how vulnerable we all are to data mining and triangulation.
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Americans! Under the spurious cover of budget necessity, vested interests who would prefer the bright lights of transparency to be turned off are attacking a wide range of the new initiatives that only just got started to make your government accountable. Sign up here to tell them you’re watching and they should stop.
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The degree to which “mission creep” has allowed the media industry to become a tool for a wide variety of vested interests to ratchet up controls that do nothing but harm citizens is incredible. I never cease to be amazed by the degree to which our political representatives act against the majority interests and in favour of rich minorities with lobbyists. Can’t they see it? Surely the injustice is in plain view?
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Good to see the process continuing. Hope it leads to good things for us all.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Privacy and Transparency
Posted on March 29, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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I’ve installed Amazon’s AppStore on my Android phone and I’m finding it much more compelling than Android Market. I bet it’s much more compelling for software developers too.
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Lucid and compelling explanation of Google’s business model – must-read.
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Many congratulations to James Gosling on finding an employer that’s not evil.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Android
Posted on March 28, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Amazing they can say all this without noting that the very same technique used by an individual stopped by the TSA/DHS/FBI/DEA would lead to prosecution for obstruction of justice and destroying evidence (and quite possibly a beating).
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Kodak first showed their hand as patent troll against Sun – a company in which they had previously invested – and have gone on to try to fund their ongoing terminal failure by taking potshots at the success of others. The latest victims are Apple and RIM, and until patent law gets changed this undeserved tax on innovation and success will continue.
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This article in The H has extensive comments by me that lay our my views pretty well in the context of a useful overall perspective on all that unites the software freedom communities.
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Very interesting VoIP client which seems to have all the features of Skype but is GPL and available for Windows and Linux too. While some comments I’ve received call it “open core” I can’t see any features in the software that differ between the standard and Pro versions.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on March 23, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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I’m still a fan of OpenStack but Rick’s evaluation worries me. I hope there’s someone still at NASA or rackspace that understands that the point about trading control for influence is a matter of creating success, and that projects which have a community member which believes it is entitled to more rights than anyone else rarely flourish.
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There’s still the question of processing waste from this technology, but the rest of its profile looks highly preferable to the alternatives.
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Interesting project that could make quite a difference if the result is lighter weight both in terms of code size/complexity and processing/bandwidth requirements.
- GoOpen Keynote Slides
The slides from my keynote in Oslo today – probably only of interest to attendees.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Futures
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