Business service providers are unlikely to just cut you off on a whim. So why do the terms of use all cloud providers impose leave them with an unquestioned right to do so? The answer is that the legislative environment makes it happen, and is becoming more extreme all the time. They can be struck with copyright notices, patent actions, legal investigations and even direct government requests, and they want to make sure when it happens, they have no liability. Read all about it on InfoWorld.
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.
Has Microsoft got a problem? The extensive new features in Samba 4 make it a viable, license-free, security-certified alternative to Active Directory, and make OpenChange a viable alternative to Exchange. What’s more, Microsoft has participated in testing to make sure they work as advertised. This could be the open source identity solution everyone has been waiting for.
None of this could have happened without Microsoft’s European anti-trust conviction in 2004 and the subsequent purchase of the documentation on behalf of the Samba team in 2007. Could this be the first time an anti-trust settlement has done more than just fine the victor? My piece in InfoWorld has more.
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.
I was pleased yesterday to see the MariaDB community starting the process of creating a Foundation to host open collective governance for their community. I’ll be interviewing Monty on Monday in a live webcast at 5pm; watch my Google+ stream for the hangout. Meanwhile, I’ve written a short news item on InfoWorld about the Foundation.
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.
Are you at risk if you use code from GitHub? There’s a lot of code shared on GitHub. But surprisingly, much of it is “all rights reserved”, meaning despite being public you have no specific rights to use it. GitHub don’t require projects to apply a copyright license of any kind, let alone an open source license that would give you the right to use, study, improve and share the code. I dig in to the issue in today’s InfoWorld column.
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.
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