I was blown away by a paper by legal scholar Mark Lemley when I read it in full this week. He plausibly claims there’s a very simple and elegant solution to software patents in the USA that simply needs a future defendent to use it in their defence. Read about it in this week’s InfoWorld article.
Filed under: InfoWorld, Patents | Comments Off on Software Patent Solution Under Our Noses
Remote staff? Learn from open source. My article for InfoWorld this week observes that having a distributed team works best when you borrow the practices of the most successful open source projects, just as businesses like Automattic and the former MySQL did.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Tagged: Automattic, MySQL | Comments Off on Distributed Teams And Open Source
DRM farces are like London buses. You wait for ever, and then several come along at once. After writing my story for ComputerWorld about the blackout of the Hugo awards by a copyright enforcement robot with no concept of “fair use”, along came an even more stunning story. Yes, the big rally to reselect Barak Obama as candidate for the upcoming US elections was hit by a shoot-first-ask-questions-afterwards bot claiming to be protecting just about every content provider imaginable.
So I’ve updated and expanded the story for InfoWorld – take a look. The key quote:
“When a technologist embodies their or their employer’s view of what’s fair into a technology-enforced restriction, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step, and freedom is quantized. That quantization of discretion is always in the interest of the person forcing the issue.”
When you assign algorithms to make subjective judgements, they can’t. Instead, they impose the biases of the people who created them. The content distributors, like UStream and YouTube have a bias, created by US law, to block anything that might turn out to be infringing, because that’s how they get “safe harbor”. Thus the technology they wrote or bought from snake-oil suppliers is imposing their bias.
We fix it not by getting the suppliers to do better bots – they can’t, algorithms are incapable of subjective judgement – but by fixing the law so it doesn’t incent the providers to have this bias.
Filed under: Copyright, DRM, InfoWorld | Comments Off on It’s Not Just The Hugos
Plenty of “open”, “ad-free” and even “free” is mentioned in various places, of course. But I took a good look at App.Net and found the concepts of software freedom – as well as any expression of them in open source – seriously lacking. I explain in today’s InfoWorld column.
Filed under: InfoWorld | 1 Comment »
Patents are now an anti-trust weapon rather than a reward for innovation. That’s my conclusion after a weekend trying to decided whether I has happy or sad Apple had beaten Samsung in the billion-dollar-suit in San Jose. It’s just a part of a deeper narrative around the fight by the winners of the 20th century to stop the upstarts of the 21st century from succeeding.
The case is an inevitable consequence of the fact the patent system has not kept pace with the realities of globalised business, the complex, fast-paced technology sector or the reality of open source software. Patents were supposed to protect the instantiation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. But the system has been thoroughly, impossibly gamed, to the point where only a Grand Master can play it.
Patent law is now being used as an anti-competitive weapon so much that I begin to wonder whether it’s the anti-trust/competition laws rather than patent law that should be updated first. Read more in InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld, Patents | Tagged: Apple, Samsung | 1 Comment »
Even if you’re not using LibreOffice, you owe it a debt of gratitude because it (and its ancestors) forced Microsoft to interoperate, have a stable file format and innovate. I explain more in this week’s InfoWorld column.
Filed under: InfoWorld, LibreOffice | Comments Off on How Open Source Forced Microsoft’s Hand
My article for InfoWorld this week considers three different projects – OmniOS (derived from Illumos, the new name given to OpenSolaris), GitHub and OpenStack – and finds different attitudes towards corporate control giving different results.
Filed under: Governance, InfoWorld, OpenSolaris | Tagged: GitHub, OmniOS, OpenStack | Comments Off on Influence vs Control
Don’t Get Locked In
In InfoWorld today, I explain why I gave my wife my iPad. She loves it, and I am very happy too as I now use a Google Nexus 7 tablet for everything the iPad used to do – and a load more.
The most important part is in the last slide, which I reproduce here for your enjoyment. There’s an essay about that.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Comments Off on On Marital Harmony
My column for InfoWorld this week considers the unseen value open source brings into the economy, and references this keynote from OSCON by Tim O’Reilly.
[youtube http://youtu.be/Kbcgmf6eDKU]Filed under: InfoWorld | Tagged: OSCON | Comments Off on The Open Source Stimulus Plan
While HP was making plenty of noise at OSCON about its deployment of OpenStack as HP Cloud, it was the discovery that they have moved their open source program office to the heart of the company that convinced me they’re serious about open source in their products. Read more in InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Tagged: OSCON | Comments Off on HP, Open Source and OpenStack
Meshed Insights - Open Source Management Consulting
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
© 2010-23, Simon Phipps. All rights reserved, all wrongs righted. Unless otherwise credited all photographs, videos and other media are included in this statement. Some photographs are available for licensing via iStockPhoto. To contact the author, please use the e-mail form.
Wild Webmink 