Posted on March 15, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Great to see Tim has already landed a new job after leaving Sun – congratulations. It will be good to have someone on hand to get support for my new phone! Let’s hope the requirement for editorial vetting is just for the initial posting.
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Another useful posting from David Hammerstein suggests that, while opposition to ACTA in the European Parliament was unanimous (apart from 13 losers from two anti-Europe parties), this was a symbolic “how dare you route around Parliament” rather than an actual opposition to the terms of ACTA. He suggests the Commission will now counter-punch and that the most interesting times are yet to come.
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Read the e-mail that the head of BPI sent to all his members and you’ll be interested to see that he doesn’t think anyone outside a few hot-heads cares about the Digital Economy Bill, and that he doubts MPs will have the guts to call for a debate. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to prove him wrong? Maybe a note to your MP via WriteToThem.Com is in order?
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Jim Grisanzio is the best guy I know in community management and strategy (yes, really) and he has a new blog which I think you should follow. Plenty in there about OpenSolaris of course, but there’s so much to learn from Jim’s way with communities apart from that. And congratulations on being elected vice-president of the Tokyo Linux User Group, Jim!
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Seems Ubuntu developers are protecting me from myself by removing all mention of XDMCP from the GUI. These instructions explain how to turn on XDMCP again without the benefit of a Security tab on the Login Preferences dialog.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Good and Evil
Posted on March 14, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Actually it wasn’t all that lazy, there has been so much to do. But here are some music picks for the week – don’t miss the Sister Hazel double album if you’re in the US, and the Turin Brakes track is the pick for the UK.
| Loc |
Title |
Artist |
Comments |
| USA |
Mamaya |
The Souljazz Orchestra |
Take a brisk walk with this loping world-jazz track |
| UK |
Leave Me In Love |
The High Wire |
From the stylophone opening to the subdued vocals you know it’s chill time. It gradually perks up. Not bad. |
| USA |
Perfect World |
U-Melt |
Reminds me of Pink Floyd in some ways, a pretty good chill prog rock |
| USA |
Album: 20-in-10 |
Sister Hazel |
Really good Sister Hazel sampler. 20 excellent rock tracks, the best free download in ages |
| UK |
Apocolips |
Turin Brakes |
Very good track from a reliably good band. Rich & innovative sound with a travelling pace. |
| UK |
Rocket (Richard X One Zero Remix) |
Goldfrapp |
Strong dance track that Goldfrapp fans would grab anyway but the rest of us are likely to enjoy too. |
One more thing – seems that there are downloads of the SXSW music showcase after all, assuming you have the patience for about 6Gb of torrent.
Filed under: Links, Music | Tagged: Amazon, MP3, Music | Comments Off on ♫ Music from a lazy week
Posted on March 14, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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"The U.S. position for the moment appears closer to 'take it or leave it' with the bet that many ACTA partners will see little political alternative but to take it." — I agree that's likely to be what the US "negotiators" think, but they surely have to take seriously the threat posed by the vote this week in Europe, which could mean not one country but a whole bloc refusing to ratify the treaty. The ACTA strategy relies on a fait accomplis that no nation can afford to refuse; having 26 nations refuse calls the bluff on that strategy.
US citizens: Is this really what you want done in your name? Do your representatives know how you feel about it?
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The wonderful thing about open source is that once softweare has been set free it can find new ways of being useful and evolving even if its original benefactors go away. I'm delighted to see Project Wonderland from Sun Labs finding a new home like this. I hope the other projects that are being put out to grass find similarly enthusiastic homes.
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Hopefully this includes chopping firewood.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, FOSS, Health, Sun, Wonderland | Comments Off on ☞ Not In Your Name?
Posted on March 13, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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No, not spin, he really means it. A sad illustration of the gaping intellectual chasm in American politics.
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Nice infographics from the BBC showing the evolution of use of the internet worldwide.
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Really excellent how-to that is worth reading all the way through and then bookmarking for future use (like I just did!)
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Use Of Power
Posted on March 12, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Responding to the request for action, Open Source for America has published a strong refutation of the position IIPA has taken on open source. “Open Source for America (OSFA) believes the IIPA’s request to be both irresponsible and misleading in its characterization of OSS. OSFA strongly urges the USTR, and all government agencies, to firmly reject such unfounded pressure to blacklist or penalize any country for policies allowing or encouraging the use of OSS.”
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We desperately need some well-funded lobbyists who are working for, rather than against citizen rights and digital liberty like the shameless, customer-hating BPI. ORG is making a reasonable try but they are no EFF. Freedom needs a posse.
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Nothing very radical here, apart from the appearance of ™ on the logo and the appendage of Oracle ownership of that mark.
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“A remarkable example is the London Underground mosquito. It is believed to have evolved from an above-ground species which moved into tunnels being excavated to construct the London underground rail system in the 1850s.”
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Brand, Digital Economy Bill, Evolution, IIPA, Marketing, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, OSFA, Science | Comments Off on ☞ Lobbying, Marketing and Evolution
Posted on March 11, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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In the closest thing we’ll see to a unanimous multi-partisan vote in any modern democracy, the European Parliament resolved that ACTA negotiations must be transparent, must be limited to existing EU law and must not make three-strikes and other sociopathic ideas mandatory. This is the first big obstacle to the secret corporate juggernaut that has been rolling to trade our freedoms for corporate profits and it’s fantastic news.
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A complete browser-based collaborative meeting system, all built from open source components. I’m in the process of downloading and building it for my test server, but the demo makes it look ideal for community meetings like the GNOME Board, OpenSolaris Governing Board and OSI Board, all of which I’ve participated in and which have struggled to find a solution that is both free software and one-click-easy. This looks like it’s both.
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Mitchell Baker announces the revision of the Mozilla Public License. This is a welcome development; if it had been done 7 years ago we wouldn’t have the CDDL today.
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Great posting from the CEO of the company that runs WordPress on the benefits of a distributed organisation. Having been part of a distributed organisation myself I do wonder how well this scales; doing so certainly needs enlightened management.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Mozilla, VoIP, Work | Comments Off on ☞ Networked Society
Posted on March 10, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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This is an excellent motion, placing restraint on the ability of the European Commission to conduct opaque negotiations that will effectively bind the European parliament before they have been exposed and reviewed. Looking forward to reading the highlights of the debate. If you have a fast-track to your MEP, this is worth mentioning to them.
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Lovely narrative around various patent activities from Jonathan Schwartz. Love the irony of using Google to link to Sun's search patent…
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Jay with an explanation of why the whole Drizzle team (working on the refactoring of MySQL to suit cloud computing) has moved to Rackspace (a cloud computing supplier). Makes perfect sense to me.
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What could /possibly/ go wrong? Can anyone remember cane toads in Australia? Usually it's only the software industry that releases dangerous bugs.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Cloud, Copyright, Drizzle, Environment, Knotweed, Patents | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 is now ready for signature. The Declaration establishes principles by which ACTA will be judged when it finally uncloaks and we discover how it is in fact armed. It’s time to use your preferred means to contact your MEPs and ask them to sign it.
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Maybe if they do a good job Oracle would consider retiring CDDL and using this instead?
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Paul Carr with a relatively fair and balanced view of the Digital Economy Bill – seductively so. But I don’t agree with his conclusions.
While the social contract behind copyright has merit (creating a protected ‘space’ where a copyright creation can be monetised in exchange for its dedication to the public domain), the digital age has driven a switch from a control-centric (‘hub-and-spoke’) society to an emergiunbg peer-to-peer society. There are no ‘fixes’ we can do to copyright to make it work right; we need to start again and invent a copyright for the digitial age.
The Digital Economy Bill is well intentioned, but there are no fixes available to make analogue copyright law work for a digital society and I fear the Bill will just make things worse, unleashing a “sorcerer’s apprentice” effect of unintended consequences the way the US DMCA has done. The Bill has to be stopped, not patched.
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A great potted history from Dries Buytaert, timeline-style.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Digital Economy Bill, Mozilla | Comments Off on ☞ Maintenance required
Posted on March 7, 2010 by Simon Phipps
§ I’m still listening to new music and it seems the proximity of SXSW is triggering a cascade of releases. Here are some samples from this week’s listening.
| Loc |
Title |
Artist |
Comments |
| UK |
Need Love |
Dr Meaker |
Laid back jazz-blues-funk with female vocals, rather than the dance track you might expect. |
| USA |
The Deep and Lovely Quiet |
SubtractiveLAD |
Dreamy, slightly metallic echo-acoustic of the shoe-gaze, Engineers variety. Would not be out of place in a Robert Rich concert. |
| USA |
Culpa De La Luna |
Rupa and the April Fishes |
Pretty delicious stuff – imagine early Madness as world music with female vocals and you’re maybe close |
| USA |
Let The Riverrun |
Carly Simon |
Verging on gospel, this is a great track from Carly Simon as she is now (rather than the blast from the past you usually get from her Best-Of fodder) |
Let me know what you think – I’ll keep listening and if people like the reports I’ll keep posting too.
Filed under: Links, Music | Tagged: Amazon, MP3, Music | Comments Off on ♫ Music To Soothe A Wild Mink
Posted on March 6, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Animation, Disney, FOSS, Open Source | Comments Off on ☞ End-Times?
Wild Webmink 