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• Government suppliers may be ordered to open up data
  I’ll believe it when I see it. The whole point of outsourcing in government contexts (and not just IT – think of military security in Iraq) is to push the dirty business of actually getting things done behind a contractual firewall where they can safely shelter under the cover of “commercially sensitive” and avoid being questioned.
• Re-tweeting the revolution
  “The war on terror is over. We lost.” — the weak-minded direct-causal thinking that’s driven the west’s entire response to the educated, layered and cunning strategy Bin Laden has been executing to destroy non-Islamic society has indeed led to the result Bin Laden wanted, as fear has overwhelmed justice and justice has overwhelmed mercy.

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• Should Companies That Use Open Source Software Pay a Tithe?
  They should certainly budget to obtain service and ensure they pay the companies and people that make the software upon which they depend, whether they need support or not. If they don’t, it might not get updated again. And I like the idea of budgeting a minimum amount for this. But I’m not so sure abstract “giving to the community” is a good idea. Experience shows that a community selectively paying community members to participate demotivates everyone else.
• Legal Attack on Internet Music Storage Threatens ‘Safe Harbor’ Rules for Online Businesses
  Another valuable EFF action, this time protecting “safe harbour” for service providers. Robust legal protection for common-carrier-status is a vital part of enabling innovation and growth.
• Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized
  The most important aspect of this is that India requires royalty-free (and not RAND) licensing for patents in standards.

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• Forking doesn’t work
  Michael Meeks points out one of the poorly recognised aspects of dual-license scenarios (including those where patents are licensed). The contract companies submit to in order to gain non-open-source access to the software may well (in my experience usually does) include clauses restricting the exercise of freedoms available under the open source license. That can mean losing the freedom to contribute to competing projects or the freedom to use the software in other contexts under the open source license rather than under the private agreement. 

  One of the unseen menaces to software freedom is bilateral (private) agreements that supersede apparent freedoms. That’s a great reason to oppose RAND as a way of licensing patents in standards by the way – RAND ensures the market is not transparent and open because it compels participants to engage in bilateral agreements that supersede software freedom.

• Red Hat tries the value argument for open source
  This is the sort of thing that makes me want to believe in synchronicity. My keynote in Bolzano at SFSCON just before Savio posted this story was about some of the benefits of open source that would be worth paying extra for.
• Oracle and Apple Announce OpenJDK Project for OSX
  Good to see a solution being found. It’s by no means a perfect answer; I see that initially the support will be SoyLatte-style. It will clearly take some time to get the OpenJDK version to the level users expect. But at least the public campaigns had some effect.

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