Wild Webmink

• Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory…Ain’t
  Good pointer here by Glyn to an action we can take to check the effects of pro-patent lobbying in Europe. He misses a trick when he doesn’t point out that even RF licensing of patents in standards can be toxic to open source.

  If the patent holder uses a non-royalty-based restriction – such as the requirement that all legal entities must register for a no-charge license – the lack of a single legal entity to take that action for many open source communities makes it a show-stopper. Worse, if any license so obtained is non-sub-licensable then even the existence of a legal entity would still mean an insurmountable practical barrier existed for the project. Any implicit requirement that the license was necessary would also breach the terms of the license for many projects.

  In summary: RF is only of if it means “restriction-free”, not “royalty-free”.
• EU wants punitive measures against patent infringements in ACTA
  Shameful action by the European Commission, who are pressing for patent infringement to be included in the scope of ACTA.
• COBOL ON COGS
  If Ruby on Rails is a bit ambitious for you, why not build your next project in Cobol on Cogs?

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Governments Protecting Outdated Business Models

• The VC-free startup
  The trend for VC-free startups is strong, and Dale’s article makes for interesting reading. ForgeRock is another example of a VC-free startup, and I’d say we fit Dale’s profile pretty well. This is not to say we will never seek investment now we’re bootstrapped, of course, but the idea of a VC-funded company aiming solely at an exit to recoup the initial investment was one we all disliked.
• Take Heed, Tech Giants: Edison’s Failed Plot To Hijack Hollywood

  Well worth taking the time to read this story of the attempt by Thomas Edison to take control of the nascent movie industry using patent suits, an industry association as a heavy-handed enforcer and then a patent pool as the weapon against any company daring to innovate or meet actual customer demand.

  Yes, there is nothing new in the actions of Paul Allen, the RIAA and BSA or of MPEG-LA, it’s all been done before. Reading this really leaves me wondering why massive patent and copyright reform haven’t both happened already.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Innovation, and how to prevent it

• Ultra All Stars: The 2010 Sampler for Amazon
  This free sampler album (only downloadable by people with US Amazon.Com accounts) has some great electronic/dance tracks on it, especially the ones from Late Night Alumni and Kaskade.
• ‘Patently Absurd’ Lawsuits Proliferate Among Web Firms
  “The problem with these sorts of lawsuits is that they have become just part of doing business in the world of technology. They don’t hurt big companies, but they make it harder for smaller ones to innovate without fear of running headlong into a lawsuit that will burn through startup capital. And they’ll continue to be a drain on the technology industry’s ability to innovate until someone manages to ban software patents and put their protection under copyright where it belongs.”
• Arabic to become compulsory in Israeli schools
  It’s just possible this is the most important step towards middle east peace we have yet seen.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Modern

• Does the Fate of OpenSolaris Tell Us Where Unix Is Headed?
  I coined a new (tongue-in-cheek) law yesterday – “For every epic fail there is an equal and opposite epic win” – and this could well be an instance of it. A clever and keen bunch of people are being liberated from the expectation someone else is going to do the job and motivated to establish a fully open, fully Free Unix kernel in the Illumos project. I’m now on the look-out for the counterbalancing “win” for some other “fail”…
  So, I don’t think so. But it does liberate Illumos.

Also:

• Welcome Apple, seriously
  It appears that Apple are happy to play open but Facebook aren’t quite so keen to join in. That’s the deal with “open” – it cuts both ways.
• Henry Story and WebID
  Another member of the Sun diaspora, with a very worthwhile idea.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Webmink’s Law of Preservation of Win

• Serbia: “Better on Facebook Than in the Streets”
  Interesting article points out what I think is a global phenomenon, where the popular press treats web social media as a threat instead of as an opportunity. Just the same thing happened with blogging, where the popular anti-meme was “you’ll lose your job if you blog”.
• Facebook could cost you your job!
  Sample FUD that just happened to show up in my mail today 🙂
• Google’s Earth – William Gibson
  Insightful yet typically dystopian view of Google from the great William Gibson.

Filed under: Links | 2 Comments »

• The End of OpenSolaris
  Patrick Finch with an informed view of what happened in the past and informed conjecture about the present and future.
• Elections to BCS Council
  It’s time for elections to the BCS Council again – do we need to get some open source minded people on there?
• Survey identifies open source as an enabler of access to knowledge
  “The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyright works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.” Interesting research report that identifies open source software as part of the solution to this problem.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Insiders

• Murdoch’s New iPaper: One Last Tragic Roll Of The Digital Dice
  When all you own is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
• Grim numbers point to the end of the venture capital era
  I’d be interested to see a bit more data showing what the 7 and 5 year trends are as well, but this sounds like bad news for venture funding. Still, true open source opportunities that build on existing code and innovate are probably easier to self-fund, and we may well be on the threshold of a new wave of self-funded startups leveraging open source insight.
• Burning Man’s open source cell phone system could help save the world
  Another person in the Sun Microsystems diaspora: Glenn Edens, former head of Sun Labs and now trying to change the world with open source GSM. AGPL, uses VoIP, using Burning Man for a load test, the story is fascinating.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Two Endings and a Beginning

• Google Code Blog: An update on JavaOne
  Google pulls all their people out of JavaOne. That’s going to be a big hole in the agenda since they employ all the good speakers… (well, most of them)
• The Saga of Sun RPC
  Bradley Kuhn’s recollections of the middle of the process – worth reading along with mine & Spot’s.
• The future of Solaris, by Adam Leventhal
  Interesting and useful exploration of the history of OpenSolaris and Solaris puts Oracle’s actions into perspective. It also shows why Illumos is a true open source community with a bright future, as it’s the coming together of skilled developers who each have different reasons to need a Illumos and are synchronizing those fragmentary interests in an open and equal community around a shared commons.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ History In Action

• The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the guily and the irresponsible.
  One of the long-running projects I had at Sun was to get the (pre-GPL, permissive) license on Sun RPC changed so that GNU/Linux could become Free software at last after decades of quietly using Sun RPC under a non-Free licence (Sun never cared).

  I had it all agreed by Sun’s legal and management teams and was given permission to announce it at FOSDEM in 2009 (which you can see in my blog), but then there was some sort of foul-up after it was all agreed and Red Hat (who were making the change) never received documentation of the decision that was sufficient to give them confidence it was all over. So the changes were rolled back.

  Tom “Spot” Callaway at Red Hat persisted and finally got confirmation from an Oracle VP that permission to make the change had indeed been granted. So, at long last, glibc is Free software and we can all breathe easy that this can’t cause copyright infringement suits against Linux. Congratulations to Spot for his tenacity! Read his view of what happened.

Filed under: Links | 2 Comments »