Wild Webmink

• Minimal Competence: Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping
  “The ability to get out the data you put in is the bare minimum. All of it, at high fidelity, in a reasonable amount of time. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal.” — Interesting to have this come round again after all these years, but I agree completely and continue to applaud Flickr for being willing to take the lead. Glad it’s still this way.
• Trippin N’ Rhythm Jazz MP3 Sampler
  If you’ve a US Amazon account and like jazz, especially the stuff that smooth jazz stations play, this excellent free sampler is for you. Probably the most-played sampler I have downloaded recently. And if you don’t have a US Amazon account, sorry, you can’t get it.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Open Data

• OpenStack Community Update
  Excellent progress is being made in the OpenStack community, including implementation of support for VirtualBox, which I asked for in both the OpenStack and VirtualBox interviews on FOLSS Weekly. Huge thanks to Justin Santa Barbara.
• Tru Thoughts Jazz MP3 Sampler
  Pretty decent selection of jazz tracks free to US account-holders on Amazon MP3 USA.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Collaborative Wave

• Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested Over Anonymous Source
  “About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India’s electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are tamperproof, but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source. The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.” — It’s always easier to shoot the messenger than to heed and act on the message, especially when the message tells you something that harms your political agenda.
• No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?
  Fascinating conjecture in this Spiegel article.
• The liberation of OpenSolaris
  “Odd as it may be, Oracle’s decision to fork is actually a relief to those of us whose businesses depend on OpenSolaris: instead of waiting for Oracle to engage the community, we can be secure in the knowledge that no engagement is forthcoming — and we can invest and plan accordingly. “

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Liberation and its Opponents

• Lawsuit Raises Questions about Open Invention Network, Linux Foundation

  Tweets get as much coverage as interviews these days, it seems. Tweets lack nuance and usually lack context and do not form a good basis for journalism (or indeed spin-doctoring) without additional discussion in person.

  The author of this article quotes what I said on Twitter in 140 tongue-in-cheek characters:

  The ORCL-GOOG case makes OIN and the Linux Foundation look like the League of Nations at the start of WW2.

  If you need to read up the history, try Wikipedia. Of course my comment is hyperbolic and can be contested on all sorts of grounds – it was on Twitter, for goodness sake, it’s not a position paper!

  The point of this comment was not to dismiss the Linux Foundation or OIN. Rather, it was to observe that for whatever reason, to the average meta-community member they would have been expected to keep the peace among their members and prevent conflict over software patents breaking out. Clearly that didn’t happen here.

  Neither has commented so far, perhaps because they are genuinely engaging in diplomacy (sources suggest this). All the same, they don’t appear to have sanctions available to use against their errant members, nor do they and their direct supporters believe there is actually any duty for them to do so. I have now heard from a number of commentators annoyed I should even suggest there is something abnormal going on here.

  Software patents are broken and the only possible justification for having them is self-defence (which is itself a risky accumulation of armaments). Perhaps OIN and the Linux Foundation need to make membership conditional on members taking no first action against each other with software patents? That way there would at least be consequences of aggression, rather than just a foot-shuffling silence and potshots at people like me for “not understanding”. The article’s author says:

  Phipps, I believe, is not arguing against the OIN and the LF so much as arguing for something else: an additional solution/entity that could put the kibosh on lawsuits like these.

  Exactly.

• Oracle loses another DTrace creator
  Adam Leventhal joins the diaspora.

Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »

• Google vs Oracle ≠ open vs closed, or good vs evil

  While Matthew Aslett’s essay (above) is another useful contribution to the discussion that I recommend you read, his bias towards a commercial view of open source leads him to dismiss the emerging pattern and assert that each crocodile attack is an isolated incident that should not affect our willingness to swim in the waterhole.

  There may not be a single open source community but there is definitely a meta-community that’s experienced the network effects of open, transparent, egalitarian and co-operative behaviour around each free software commons. The open source effect is a network effect that grows exponentially with the number of collaborating participants.

  The only people who deny such a meta-community exists and is the future of software are the people who stand temporarily to win from pretending “open source” also means a proprietary (or open core) license-only no-codevelopment worldview where community=customers.

  It doesn’t. And the waterhole is not safe while we ignore the crocodile.

Also…

• The Hand May Be Forced
  “While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle, it appears that Oracle doesn’t value this.”
• Time for an OpenOffice.org Foundation
  This is a very interesting topic worthy of discussion.
• The Twitter Simon Phipps Daily
  Interesting meta-aggregator turns links posted by the people I follow on Twitter into a daily “newspaper”.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Waterholes and Crocodiles

• Oracle/Google: the strategy behind Sun, Oracle and the OSS implications
  This whole Oracle-copies-SCO mess has many degrees of complexity – historical, legal, technical, political and personal – and I personally think there’s little point engaging in speculation about outcomes and strategies until more of the cards are on the table. Having said that, there are some useful explanations of the complexities out there, and this one from Carlo is worth reading.
• Quite the firestorm
  James Gosling provides a few data points to help some of the wackier commentators on Oracle’s SCO play (as opposed to their Darwin play) understand the lay of the land.

and…

• Robots Vs. Indie Queens: Dan Mangan
  Really rather good 3-track EP free on Amazon US (other account holders need not apply, sorry). It’s reminiscent of Damien Rice, well worth the download.
• Rise of the Mamils (middle-aged men in lycra)
  I too have noticed a rising number of cyclists and runners in my circle of friends and contacts. Now I have a noun for them!

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ More Firestorm

• Oracle v Google: Why?
  Excellent discussion by Stephen O’Grady together with pointers to other commentary that’s worth considering. No conclusions, of course, since the whole scenario still beggars belief.
• Software Patents Wiki: Oracle v. Google (2010, USA)
  Crowdsourcing the analysis of the patents deployed by Oracle against Android.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Understanding Crocodiles

• Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents
  “Patents make a lot of sense in many industries …. But in software these are just nuclear weapons in an arms race. They don’t foster innovation, they inhibit it.”
• Why software startups decide to patent … or not
  “The initial findings reported here … suggest that software entrepreneurs do not find persuasive the canonical story that patents provide strong incentives to invest in technology innovation.”
• Abolish Software Patents? Be Careful What You Wish For
  “the history of innovation in the IT industry is much less a story of the free flow of ideas than the free flow of labor.” — I don’t agree with Brian for a moment that we should accept the imposition of software patents in this sort of quid pro quo, but his warning to heed the risks of trade secrets and non-competes should be heeded.
• Sometimes It Isn’t Facebook’s Fault
  Just as in the early days of blogging people were keen to publicize examples of people “fired for blogging” when actually they were fired for something else but a blog was involved in learning about it, so we see stories that blame social media for things that are actually rooted in the world of atoms.

Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »