Wild Webmink

• Microsoft Says Please, Please Stop Using Internet Explorer 6

  Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6. 

  Maybe the first time I have ever linked to a Microsoft marketing site with a warm endorsement. Show it to all your friends and tell them about Firefox.
• Patent attack on Google open codec faces ‘antitrust probe’
  If this is true it will be most welcome, as the insidious cartel-but-we’ve-made-sure-we’re-legal MPEG-LA certainly deserves investigation. They are one of the channels that’s allowing software patents to survive.
• Discoverer: R.E.M. (MP3 Downloads)
  The free tracks on Amazon UK have been pretty good this week – first the Columbia sampler, now a good track from REM.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Unexpected Goodness

• Android Gingerbread update broke Google Voice on the Nexus One
  So this is Google’s update to Google’s operating system badly breaking Google’s app for interacting with Google’s service. I thought the whole point of owning every part of the chain was so this didn’t happen?
• Columbia Label Sampler on Amazon UK
  This is a phenomenal sampler that Amazon just posted for free download by UK customers. Foo Fighters, Manic Street Preachers, Lissie, Kings of Leon, Ting Tings. Far better than the usual freebies!

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Owning The Problem?

• BSA: Open standards will ‘increase e-government costs’
  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am shocked at just how blatantly disdainful BSA are of both their customers and of the government. Asserting that open standards are bad for you is so obviously ridiculous – not to mention orthogonal to most of their members’ publicly-stated positions – that BSA just looks ludicrous here.
• US Supreme Court asserts corporations do not have a right to “personal privacy”

  Corporations do not have a right of personal privacy for purposes of Exemption 7(C) of the Freedom of Information Act, which protects from disclosure law enforcement records whose disclosure “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

  Very important reversal of a bad decision by a lower court that agreed with the extension of the equivalence of corporations and humans into “personal privacy” which would have made the Freedom of Information Act (and thus most transparency) ineffective. There’s also a good analysis on the same site.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Corporate Fictions

• Even Harry Potter Pic Loses Money Because Of Warner Bros’ Phony Baloney Net Profit Accounting
  Saving this for next time I hear a movie studio explaining how they are making a loss because of “piracy”.
• How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong
  Sad tale of how McDonalds have even managed to make oatmeal porridge bad for you.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Wrong Doings

• Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators
  I’m not big on boycotts, as I believe freedom is about what we are free to do rather than about what we must not do, but I don’t buy stuff from Sony any more and am unlikely to do so until I see a track record of positive engagement with the meshed society of the 21st century.
• A Fifteenth Century Technopanic About The Horrors Of The Printing Press
  I’ve heard a number of these historic anecdotes. Resisting and denouncing change has been with humanity from time immemorial. Despite fine stories to help us understand the folly of it, each generation still experiences privileged incumbents using fear of change as their excuse for perpetuating their privilege.
• Piracy once again fails to get in way of record box office
  Surely there has to come a point where policy makers say “hang on, if this copyright violation stuff you’re comparing to kidnapping and murder is so important, how come you keep making record profits?”

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Consequences of Paranoia

• The Document Foundation reaches fund raising target
  It took just a week for over 2000 donors to donate the €50,000 that The Document Foundation needed to act as their capital reserve in order to be registered in Germany as a “Stifftung” (capital-based non-profit trust). Once again an example of the amazing community support that’s present in the community upon which LibreOffice can draw. If they can also harness that support to provide operating income, at least to get started, we have just seen a new force on a par with the Mozilla Foundation created.
• Canonical to disable GNOME donations in Banshee
  Hard to believe how badly Canonical have allowed this situation to become in their pursuit of so little money. Is it just me imagining it or have Canonical made a series of surprisingly tone-deaf community moves recently?
• Why I believe Microsoft will buy Nokia
  Very plausible analysis from Fabrizio here. My view is that Nokia’s desperate position is the result of failing to create true community around their offerings in a way that allowed confident operation of the meshed-competitive dynamic that operates in open source. I honestly can’t see Microsoft changing that.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Community Effects

• UK Government defines open standards as royalty free
  Excellent move here, although of course the devil is in the details. The big problem with getting open source into government procurement anywhere in the world is that the system by which software is procured is weighted heavily in favour of proprietary software. The changes that are being discussed in the UK are good, but it will take more than this sort of step – easily assimilated by grudging but powerful proprietary vendors and the SIs they own – to make a difference until software freedom becomes the focus.
• Is Your Community a Community?
  Simple but good comments about the role of community management.
• Oracle responds to Hudson/Jenkins split
  The account Ted gives in this nicely placed spin omits some of the events that I recall, and unfortunately treats the whole event as a matter of unwarranted competitive assault rather than anything to do with community. There’s some indignant stuff in the comments from multiple sources and at the end of it all I don’t feel anyone comes out looking very good. Ugly and unfortunate.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Community Missing?

• ForgeRock Shines on Sun's Legacy Identity – InternetNews.com
  Lovely overview of ForgeRock's first year in this interview with me from last week.
  (tags: ForgeRock Business Identity OpenSource OpenSSO OpenDS OpenAM OpenDJ OpenIDM Clippings simonphipps)
• Open Source Approaching 30% Of Enterprise Software
  When even the trailing indicators say it, you have to pay attention.
  (tags: OpenSource Enterprise Adoption Statistics Gartner)

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Open Source Business