Wild Webmink

• To Microsoft, Open Source means “Windows Encumbered”
  Just because Microsoft is busily embracing open source, that doesn’t mean they have any interest in software freedom, as Andy Oliver points out.
  (tags: Microsoft OpenSource FOSS freedom)
• Separating Fact from Fiction: My Fair Copyright Proposals
  Excellent and balanced set of proposals from Michael Geist for copyright reform in Canada – well worth reading in full to see what’s possible. Sadly, all the signs are that Canada will adopt reform that ignores balance and citizen rights in favour of copyright owners. As I will keep saying, copyright is a social contract granting temporary monopoly in exchange for surrender of the work to the public commons – sadly government and copyright owners alike have forgotten this and insist on ever-broadening control with ever-diminishing surrender to the commons.
  (tags: Canada Copyright Reform Rights Liberty)
• Nice Work ASCAP: Convinces Yet Another Coffee Shop To Stop Promoting Local Bands
  Another story of music industry greed, excess and inflexibility that actually harms musicians. When will it end?
  (tags: ASCAP Music licensing copyright Live Band Performance)

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• Microsoft costs cut CSIRO IT jobs
  $3 million extra in licensing costs that clearly no-one had budgeted for, and lock-in that means there’s no alternative but to pay up and then cut staff to make up the budget difference. Had they used open source software, CSIRO would be free to cut their subscriptions and handle the support and downtime risk internally while they rebalanced.
  (tags: OpenSource Microsoft Economics Employment Australia)
• How Could the NetBeans Team Make Money from the NetBeans Platform?
  Looks like the pressure is on…
  (tags: NetBeans OpenSource BusinessModel Oracle)
• iBATIS Leaves Apache
  Finding the Apache community too stifling, the iBatis project has moved lock, stock, barrel and all committers to a new home. The power of open source is in the ability to fork when genuinely necessary.
  (tags: Apache OpenSource Governance iBATIS)
• Freedom To Leave
  I just added my 2006 essay on substitutibility and the freedom to leave to the selection on this web site.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Needing The Freedom To Leave

• xkcd: Infrastructures
  I’ve lost count of how many people sent me today’s XKCD, complete with a bearded figure advocating use of open document formats…
  (tags: XKCD Humour ODF activism)
• Organizations Switching from Microsoft Office Choose OpenOffice Over Google Docs
  New survey by Info-Tech Research Group seems pretty obvious if you have used both. OpenOffice.org is an office productivity suite, Google Docs is a collaboration system.
  (tags: OpenOffice.org Microsoft Office Google Docs)

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• How to hide OpenOffice.org lines if a field is empty
  I have been looking for the way to do this for ages and ages, thanks to Solveig for the tip.
  (tags: OpenOffice.org howto)

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on Waiting 7 Years For A Tip…

• jclouds
  I heard about this project at the Open Cloud Meetup in San Francisco last week. It is an abstraction layer for cloud computing, allowing you to write apps that can run on any cloud rather than being locked in to just one.
  (tags: cloud abstraction Java OpenSource)
• OpenOffice.org Internship
  OpenOffice launches its own Summer of Code, presumably becuase they keep getting blocked from Google’s for political reasons.
  (tags: OpenOffice.org Google OpenSource FOSS)

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• Web Browsers Leave ‘Fingerprints’ Behind as You Surf the Net
  You may do your best to remain anonymous on the web, you may have cookies blocked, but this research by EFF shows you can easily have your browser uniquely identified on return visits by a fingerprinting technique using the standard HTTP capabilities text that gets sent every single time you visit a site.
  (tags: Privacy EFF Research Internet Web Browser tracking analytics fingerprinting)
• Stephen Walli, Open Source and Standards Veteran, Named Technical Director of The CodePlex Foundation
  Good choice, Stephen knows all the background to all the work Microsoft has been doing and that’s a huge slice of Codeplex.
  (tags: Codeplex Microsoft OpenSource FOSS)
• Nokia Reshuffle Includes ex-Sun EVP Rich Green
  Interesting landing point for Rich Green, acting as their CTO.
  (tags: Nokia Sun)
• Playing card decides Yarmouth council seat
  I can’t help feeling this is a problem, but I can’t instantly think up a solution that’s better.
  (tags: Election Lottery UK)

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• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
  Privacy is a big word and it's being tossed around all over the place. We discussed this a little at the open cloud meetup in San Francisco on Thursday and it's evident that people are fully aware of the small risk (fully articulated in this article) and largely ignorant of the big risk, of the quantization of analogue discretion into digital triangulation. I feel an article coming on.
  (tags: Privacy Facebook)
• US Church ordains lesbian bishop Mary Glasspool
  I'm sure this seems a smart idea locally, and I am certainly not of the school of theology that believes gays and lesbians are automatically excluded from church governance. All the same, I wonder exactly what it means to be in communion when you ignore the guidance of the Archbishop of Canterbury – a wise man and hardly an extremist. As I recall, scripture instructs church leaders to set aside controversial choices when they "harm the weaker members" and I would love to hear from the Episopalians why they think they are exempt from that rule.
  (tags: Church Lesbian Bishop Ordination Theology)
• Tokyo couple married by robot in rooftop wedding
  Meanwhile the role of the church is being subsumed as its meaning becomes a second or third hand memory.
  (tags: Marriage Robot Japan Wedding BBC)
• Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition deal: full text
  No mention of fixing the betrayal of modern citizenship that happened with the Digital Economy Act – presumably because the Tories actually agree with it (follow the votes not the speeches) and this deal only involves things they agree about.
  (tags: Debill DigitalEconomyBill condem UK Politics Coalition)

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