Welcome to Autumn. I’d sensed a chill in the air, but my cat confirmed it for me…
Filed under: Zeitgeist | 2 Comments »
FLOSS Weekly on JasperSoft
Posted on September 22, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I was co-host on FLOSS Weekly again this week, and the guest was the community manager from JasperSoft, who make Jasper Reports and other business intelligence software. Oh, and it was Talk Like A Pirate Day.
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Surprising Sponsor
Posted on September 21, 2012 by Simon Phipps
You’ll never guess who’s bankrolling open source. In my column in InfoWorld this week, I look at an initiative to get some crucial software written for America’s schools. Wisely, the Council of Chief State School Officers is making the infrastructure, toolkit and client software all open source so that states can collaborate rather than each expensively creating their own systems.
What will come as a surprise to some is who’s bankrolling the creation of this new open source community. The Gates Foundation (along with Carnegie) are funding two $75,000 awards to seed the community. The winners of the awards stand to become the leaders in a rich new open source software market. An upcoming code camp in Boston offers the chance to get in at the start.
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Iona Tour – Last Gig
Posted on September 18, 2012 by Simon Phipps
We went to hear the last concert of the Iona tour Sunday night. It was a tremendous evening of music with gorgeous soundscapes enfolding intelligent, thoughtful yet emotionally dynamic lyrics performed perfectly. Iona are still delivering on the rich promise of their music after more than 20 years
Iona remind me of a Turner painting, capturing the experience of awe and grandeur with their sound without wasting energy on simplistic caricature of the ideas involved. Band founder Dave Bainbridge admitted to being a prog-rock fan when challenged by an audience member mid-set, and indeed Iona’s musical style has always verged on prog-rock without quite reaching that extreme, cutting things short enough to reach the bliss without hitting the boredom.
I chatted with Dave last night and asked him about his decision to make the band’s best-of album available as a free download. He told me that the goal is to build the mailing list and fan-base. I’m always delighted to find a band that takes responsibility for its own affairs rather than trying to blame “pirates” (AKA fans you’re not serving properly, in the main) so this seems a worthy goal; go sign up for the list and get their (magnificent) album “Treasures” completely free of charge.
That “taking responsibility” also extends to their new music. The best way to get their new album “Another Realm” is to visit their web site, where there’s a full-function international shop that as well as selling CDs also offers audiophile-quality digital downloads. It’s on Amazon
Filed under: Music | Tagged: Iona | 2 Comments »
FLOSS UK AGM
Posted on September 17, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I’ll be talking about “What’s Driving Open Source” after the Annual Meeting for FLOSS UK in London on Thursday.
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Apple and Connector Standards
Posted on September 15, 2012 by Simon Phipps
It seems Apple wasn’t serious when it promised the European commission it would use micro-USB. Read more about it in my article in ComputerWorldUK this week.
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Software Patent Solution Under Our Noses
Posted on September 14, 2012 by Simon Phipps
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.
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OSS 2012 Keynote
Posted on September 11, 2012 by Simon Phipps
What’s driving open source in 2012? I presented a keynote address at OSS2012, the 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems this morning. My talk, entitled “What’s Driving Open Source”, tried to capture the forces that are shaping the evolution of the concept of software freedom and its pragmatic expression through open source software.
In the talk, I explained how the idea of open source partly arose from the realisation in 1998 that trying to talk ethics with corporations is largely fruitless (as Bryan Cantrill puts it, they are like lawnmowers; when they cut your hand off, it’s not because they are evil, it’s because you stuck your hand in them to stop them rather than grasping their controls). Open source was shaped by the drivers of 1998 and onwards – mainly price and concepts derived from price by both suppliers and deployers – but in the 15 years since then, the drivers have changed.
Today, it’s licensing for community strength, responding to software patents, independent foundations, cloud computing and big data that are providing the forces that are shaping open source. I’m preparing an article on this for InfoWorld, so will say (much) more later.
Filed under: Events, Open Source | Tagged: Tunisia | 1 Comment »
Tweetlog for September 10, 2012
Posted on September 10, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Some cool demo shots of Lytro’s refocussable photos: Lytro http://t.co/DBUj0phy
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Chill out. Watch some clouds drift by 🙂 http://t.co/bDSsGC99
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Free/Libre Culture Forum in Barcelona, October 15-27 2012: http://t.co/xcAo8YuQ
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Why does the EC think companies know best regarding children & society & will put them ahead of profit? http://t.co/mWKXFK4e
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Excellent video about volunteering for animal conservation on new web site: http://t.co/jUs8l06D
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Kenyan government switches to open source: http://t.co/1b7CaoDr
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Would you develop an open source education app for $75k? SLC Apps Bounty Program is for you: http://t.co/DPC1PyL4
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More data on why people reject science – http://t.co/mzn63Zbp
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Turns out FinFisher needs an export license. Pity it’s not blocked on ethical grounds but at least it’s controlled: http://t.co/K7RWZJ34
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Distributed Teams And Open Source
Posted on September 7, 2012 by Simon Phipps
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
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