Posted on August 17, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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A new operating system distribution emerges from the OpenSolaris/Illumos legacy. An excellent piece of work technically, bringing all the strengths that Solaris bequeathed to Illumos into union with the strength of KVM and pragmatically binding them together with BSD packaging. The real questions will be around licensing since this package blends all three licensing styles with just a grin.
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Delightfully comprehensive instructions on how to build LibreOffice.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Smart Build
Posted on August 16, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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By introducing remote control points we risk more and more of this. Since the holders of the control point usually have little incentive to treat your case as a priority, the outcome is frustrating, slow and indefinite. Strongly federated identity anchored in an organisation that has a duty to be accountable to you personally is the answer, but I don’t see that anywhere in the cloud yet.
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Very interesting and provocative article asserting that the problem with the US economy is that control is now in too few hands, both government regulators and the corporations to which they funnel control or by which they undergo regulatory capture.
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Open source alternative to Prezi. Yes please!
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on August 15, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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This policy is amazingly misguided – it’s like Franco trying to stamp out Catalan by banning baby names not on the state list.
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I can’t help thinking the people working on this project need reigning in for a while. This is just shoddy.
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Whatever anyone says about G+, they have a long way to go before they sink to Facebook’s level.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on August 11, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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It’s not enough to be the richest company in the world. Everyone else has to fail as well.
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Reading around this subject, it is really hard to imagine a tablet computer design that would not fall foul of Apple’s over-broad definitions here. If you’ve used an Android tablet, you’ll know that the experience of doing so is very different from using an iPad. By taking these unreasonable and anti-competitive actions, Apple is actually asking us to consider the iPad and the family of Android tablets as peers – a very odd behaviour from a company who in the past have encouraged people to look beyond similar appearance to superior behaviour. Given I actually prefer my Android tablet to an iPad (yes, I have used both) maybe the deep truth here is Apple knows their product will prove inferior to the rapidly-evolving Android tablet really soon unless they can use dirty tactics to stifle it?
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“We need to face the facts, patent law is killing job creation. If the current administration wants to improve job creation, change patent law and watch jobs among small technology companies develop instantly”
— Mark Cuban
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Monopolist-in-waiting
Posted on August 9, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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If LibreOffice maintains the pace of improvement Brian describes here, by the time work on OpenOffice resumes next year (yes, I really think it will take that long) the gap will be huge.
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This looks like a very interesting system, one I’ve personally been wanting for quiet a while.
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While it’s great to see action being taken against spam, it seems to me that this guy is an antique compared with the real malware problems today and the organised crime that’s behind them.
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Thank goodness we have scientists to help us answer the hard questions.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ … and in other news …
Posted on July 26, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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The Internet never forgets.
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A more detailed article explaining the problem VLC is having with companies using not just the code (which they are free to do) but also the reputation of an open source project as part of dubious business practices. This is a massive problem for the most famous open source brands, and I am especially worried that there’s no-one protecting OpenOffice.org end-user from these sorts of scams at present or, as far as I can tell, any time in the near future.
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The arrangement to prop up SUSE continues.
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A patent application published by the USPTO last Thursday reveals that Microsoft has been researching, since before December 2009, how to redirect VoIP calls to intercept devices and law enforcement agents. The method disclosed by the patent application is devious—subverting routing protocols so that packets sent by any person tagged by a monitoring request will be routed through a recording agent.”
Guessing this is not just a speculative filing. It covers all uses of VoIP including in-game and via-IM.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 25, 2011 by Simon Phipps
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Community reflection
Posted on July 20, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Big-risk strategy in play here. Let’s hope their plan is visionary and strong, as there’s no doubt that the technology industry needs the disruption.
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The BBC have an Android app that gathers signal strength data the whole time. I can’t think of anyone else I would trust to give me an app like this! Hope the results have enough richness to become a useful input to the regulatory debate.
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The week after JavaOne if I’m not mistaken.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Android Angles
Posted on July 15, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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The key lesson from prohibition, ignored by policy hawks, is that “it is cultural acceptance of legal norms, not fear of punishment, that makes a free society a law-abiding one”.
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Interesting screen-sharing service; pity there’s no Linux support.
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When the War On Drugs crew read this, they will hopefully try to make burgers illegal and trigger the revolution.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Links Without Links
Posted on July 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
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Bradley Kuhn of the Software Conservancy is clearly opposed both to Project Harmony’s work products and sponsors.
In short, Project Harmony is a design-flawed solution looking for a problem.
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Stephen Walli of the Outercurve Foundation seems happy with the results.
The Harmony Project is an attempt to provide some clarity to the discussion by creating a set of usable documents (with their guide, Creative Commons-style agreement generator, and FAQ) and the first version of the documents will be a stake in the ground to anchor debate for some time. I’ve great confidence that the agreements will continue to evolve with discussion and debate, and the core Harmony team should be applauded for their efforts to date.
- Harmony Agreements Reach 1.0
Open source consultant Dave Neary has a view that I find it easy to share.
Do you really need a CLA to achieve your objectives? Is it, in fact, harmful to some of what you want to achieve? At the end of the day, my position remains the same: the goal should not be to write a better CLA, it should be to figure out whether we can avoid one altogether, and figure out how to create and thrive in a vibrant developer community.
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The first part of the article by Richard Fontana of Red Hat.
Despite my admiration, respect and affection for those who have been driving Harmony, I cannot endorse the product of their work. I believe Harmony is unnecessary, confusing, and potentially hazardous to open source and free software development.
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The second part of the article by Richard Fontana of Red Hat. Richard declares the whole Harmony project misguided.
Formal contributor agreements, whether maximalist or minimalist, remain an uncommon phenomenon in open source. We are only beginning to learn what works, what fails, and what causes harm to open source community development. It is premature for us to unify, or harmonize, the ‘law’ of open source contribution policies. We are particularly not ready to declare victory for the perennially controversial maximalist approach, let alone Harmony’s new take on it.
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Here finally is the Harmony website complete with the release version of the agreements, largely hidden behind a form-driven wizard. I’d suggest you consider all forms the the CAA to be bad for your community, and only the first two variants of the CLA – with fixed and limited outbound licenses – to be usable (carefully) without harm assuming you have decided that some form of copyright accumulation is unavoidable.
(Footnote: This link post is the basis for Thursday’s Joining The Dots)
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Dis Harmony
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