Posted on March 22, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000 euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euro.
Unleash true community and the result is a flood of contribution of all kinds. I now run only LibreOffice and have deleted the “safety copies” of OO.o from my machines.
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Good primer on what’s wrong with centralised services on the web and what we can do to prevent them becoming control points that leech away our freedoms.
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When a large business stalls, it falls back onto dirty tricks and ethically questionable but legal moves to generate cash and scare competitiors. Microsoft has been in this state for quite some time. Watch for them to explain how they still love open source but… (looking at you, Gianugo)
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Richard Stallman does not believe that copying the headers alone from a GPLed file creates a derivative work.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Community Effects
Posted on March 20, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Turns out that the electricity crisis triggered by the multiple tragedies in Japan is the result of never having fixed the standards duality in the power supply that arose from having two strong players in their market claiming their standard needed to be respected and instead of picking one, permitting the “two standards” oxymoron to survive.
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Caterina (co-founder of Flickr) has an insightful take on the psychological game that social networking plays to get us addicted.
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Here’s one of the reasons I’m not investing in Blu-Ray. In the name of addressing “piracy”, the movie industry is artificially crippling Blu-Ray so that its most loyal customers are repeatedly punished for buying it. Meanwhile, actual criminals who sell illegal copies of the movies are barely inconvenienced becuase they have access to the raw digital content. Digital restriction measures do nothing to protect the industry and simply harm customers.
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I was kindly sent a copy of this report, and would warmly recommend it. The opening article, which is the subject of Cory’s item here, is full of discoveries (or at very least full of research-based support for the things I already believed).
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Excellent (serious) visualisation of the amounts of radiation in the environment and their effects from xkcd. Full of discoveries, worth spending the time to study this.
Filed under: Links | 3 Comments »
Posted on March 18, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This Privacy International report covers a few of the reasons citizens in surveilled society should avoid Skype. I avoid it for these reasons and more, including:
- It’s 100% closed – design, interfaces, source – so all four software freedoms are absent
- I’ve no idea who is tapping it, voice or text
- It is not possible to add in-stream protection like OTR to fix that
- Clients are only available where Skype chooses to make them available so the full range of tools is not available to us
- It’s turning into adware
- Its use makes users invest less in their own VoIP – lazy loss of freedom by willing slaves
- It can’t be integrated in a general purpose client effectively so it’s another (huge) process to load
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There was a time this sort of ignorant, rigged “research” would have been excusable. That time is well past, and the people involved should be ashamed.
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Pity there’s no option for gift subscriptions. Check out the blog with all the editorial replies.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Skype | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 17, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This repeated lack of balance and failure to consider the overall cultural and technical picture of the change the Internet is catalysing is just so bad. Where is the voice speaking up for culture, youth and the individual? Another betrayal of “Yes We Can”.
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As we expand to support more customers and contribute more to the OpenAM and OpenDJ projects, we need more technical staff. Take a look if you’re based in the Portland OR/Vancouver WA area.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Missing Balance
Posted on March 16, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This looks like an excellent initiative to create a decentralised voice-over-Internet service. Timely and necessary.
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Of all the photos around the web showing the consequences of the disasters in Japan, none has brought the scale of the destruction home more clearly than these interactive aerial before-and-after photos.
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Gratifying to see OW2 completing a score card. Once I’ve had the chance to discuss this with them I’ll post my own evaluation based on their data.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Assorted Links
Posted on March 15, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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It is confirmed; open source has hit the top of the bell-curve. Gartner now believes it’s a tipping-point trend, so it’s definitely the case that open source software is mainstream and has been for several years.
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A spot-on article reviewing the history of UK government lip service to open source and finding it wanting.
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Looks like an interesting enough event, of the kind we used to hold at Sun back in 2006, but it lacks credible community voices as far as I can see.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on March 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Looks like we have even more link corrosion coming up. Would it really be so hard just to freeze all the content and leave it in place so that everyone’s links keep working?
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Seems the concerns that the OSI and FSF expressed to the DoJ were possibly justified.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Dead Lines
Posted on March 11, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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While OpenLogic understandably has an interest in promoting their services to companies engaged in the development of commercial software, I’d suggest their implication that open source is in some way a special case here is over-stated. Any product that’s built using input software written by others needs attentive management of the terms under which the copyright is licensed.
That needs careful management processes which are applicable regardless of whether the software is licensed bilaterally under proprietary terms or multilaterally under open source terms. Thus though it’s not stated this way, they seem to be asserting that the new smartphone market includes a lot of inexperienced developers who don’t realise that.
It’s surely more a function of the immaturity of the market and its participants than specifically of open source, which is really only implicated here because it’s really not about open source but about OpenLogic’s business, their marketing stunt and the community transparency they are exploiting.
Also:
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Interesting interview with Mozilla’s new CEO.
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Fascinating read on the surge of demand that hit Pinboard when Yahoo deprecated delicious (which I am still using only becuase Pinboard doesn’t offer link-blogging). Well worth reading if you are engaged in web application design.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on March 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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The Freedom Box project will succeed or fail on whether it works “without sysadmin”. If only trained sysadmins can figure out how to be free, the society won’t be free. It’s like the early days of the telephone, when they couldn’t figure how to scale up the system without having every third person be a trained “Operator”.
While I am very much a supporter of Freedom Box as an initiative (I’ve even made a modest contribution to it), this comment is spot on.
- The Consumer’s Dilemma License
The resulting consumer dilemma is a ubiquitous experience in medium and low-income countries but one that confronts the American or European reader (or the media company employee conjured up by the commercial reader license) much less frequently and with much less intensity. The global market is made for those consumers. It is priced and distributed for them. They are rarely faced with what they experience as ridiculous pricing for a DVD or book–or seriously disadvantaged by differential pricing.
Fascinating experiment to create for westerners the same experience that causes unauthorised use of copyright materials in other places round the world. I expect the report is interesting too, but I doubt I’ll be reading it!
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This is a very good outcome. What makes it most welcome is that it shows there’s a growing number of MEPs who understand the issues surrounding the importance of the Internet to vote the right way. We need to build on this with more education and especially with positive reinforcement for those involved.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Keys To Freedom
Posted on March 7, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Robust reply from Red Hat concerning their decision to stop sharing details of the patches they are applying to the Linux kernel with non-subscribers. On the assumption that all the work they do on the open source code itself is committed upstream, I can see no reason at all why this step is wrong. It may make them less helpful to other developers who have come to depend on them, but they do have to defend themselves against competitive attackers and this seems a good compromise that breaks no rules.
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While it’s good to see the governance opening up as it needs to, I am told by those in the xisting community that no-one was consulted about this change. Let’s hope the result is more open. I’ve asked them if they can fill an Open-By-Rule grid for me, awaiting a reply.
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Andrew Updegrove takes the BSA’s self-serving and false argument apart and finds it as hollow as instinct said it would be.
Also:
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Responses
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