I’m going to experiment with a new (to me) format in ComputerWorld; a “while you were out” round-up of the most interesting links I’ve tweeted in the last seven days. The first is up today, for open source – let’s see how well it works.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off on WYWO
Of course FRAND terms are incompatible with software freedom, even if you can find a project that has devised a construct to allow it to attempt to accommodate that incompatibility. When a standard includes patents that are not automatically licensed to all implementers — on “Restriction Free” (RF) terms — that means a standard may require permission to be implemented. Requiring explicit permission to act is anathema to software freedom.
Read more on ComputerWorldUK.
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I had the chance to discuss with a key instigator the background to the decision by the Swiss city of Bern to switch to open source. You can read about it in my column in ComputerWorldUK today.
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I felt the report from the UK’s Joint Select Committee investigating the draft Communications Data Bill (CDB) needed a tl;dr summary, so wrote one in ComputerWorldUK today.
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Was Freiburg’s cancellation of its open source migration a foregone conclusion? With friends to support my terrible German, I tried to find out – see ComputerWorldUK for more.
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Find out on ComputerWorldUK 🙂
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I’m delighted with the definitions the UK Government has chosen for “open source” and “open standards” in their new Open Standards Principles. They are using OSI as their benchmark for open source, and have a clear statement that only standards with all rights to implement freely available are open. I’ve written more on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Comments Off on Open Means No Patents
Hearing that Amazon had remotely wiped someone’s Kindle, I decided to investigate and find out if it had actually happened. It hadn’t, but what had happened instead was perhaps as distressing and educational. I wrote about it on ComputerWorldUK.
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If you have been using the font Comic Sans to support dyslexics, there’s a new font in town – see ComputerWorldUK.
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What’s driving open source? That was the question InfoWorld asked me to explore for a feature-length article. I spent a good deal of time over the summer thinking about it, and went on to present some ideas as the opening keynote at the eighth International Conference on Open Source Systems in September.
My conclusion is that the key forces driving open source – both for good and bad – are:
I’m continuing to work on these ideas and welcome input.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Open Source | Comments Off on The Forces Of Open
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