Posted on March 12, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Responding to the request for action, Open Source for America has published a strong refutation of the position IIPA has taken on open source. “Open Source for America (OSFA) believes the IIPA’s request to be both irresponsible and misleading in its characterization of OSS. OSFA strongly urges the USTR, and all government agencies, to firmly reject such unfounded pressure to blacklist or penalize any country for policies allowing or encouraging the use of OSS.”
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We desperately need some well-funded lobbyists who are working for, rather than against citizen rights and digital liberty like the shameless, customer-hating BPI. ORG is making a reasonable try but they are no EFF. Freedom needs a posse.
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Nothing very radical here, apart from the appearance of ™ on the logo and the appendage of Oracle ownership of that mark.
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“A remarkable example is the London Underground mosquito. It is believed to have evolved from an above-ground species which moved into tunnels being excavated to construct the London underground rail system in the 1850s.”
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Brand, Digital Economy Bill, Evolution, IIPA, Marketing, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, OSFA, Science | Comments Off on ☞ Lobbying, Marketing and Evolution
Posted on March 11, 2010 by Simon Phipps
§ I gather that the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative met on Sunday to elect the board for their 2010-11 financial year. I am both honoured and delighted to discover that they have elected me as a Director, with effect from April 1st.
That’s an auspicious date 🙂 . One or two friends have asked why on earth anyone would want to commit time to OSI. They point out that the OSI has had a much lower profile over the past few years as the more notable founding members have moved on. It has been criticised for allowing too many licenses to be approved – including some of questionable merit. It’s easy to find people ready to criticise – some apparently just for the sake of it – and hard to find much more than grudging respect. Continue reading →
Filed under: Open Source, OSI, Webmink | Tagged: Open Source, OSI | 20 Comments »
Posted on March 11, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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In the closest thing we’ll see to a unanimous multi-partisan vote in any modern democracy, the European Parliament resolved that ACTA negotiations must be transparent, must be limited to existing EU law and must not make three-strikes and other sociopathic ideas mandatory. This is the first big obstacle to the secret corporate juggernaut that has been rolling to trade our freedoms for corporate profits and it’s fantastic news.
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A complete browser-based collaborative meeting system, all built from open source components. I’m in the process of downloading and building it for my test server, but the demo makes it look ideal for community meetings like the GNOME Board, OpenSolaris Governing Board and OSI Board, all of which I’ve participated in and which have struggled to find a solution that is both free software and one-click-easy. This looks like it’s both.
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Mitchell Baker announces the revision of the Mozilla Public License. This is a welcome development; if it had been done 7 years ago we wouldn’t have the CDDL today.
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Great posting from the CEO of the company that runs WordPress on the benefits of a distributed organisation. Having been part of a distributed organisation myself I do wonder how well this scales; doing so certainly needs enlightened management.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Mozilla, VoIP, Work | Comments Off on ☞ Networked Society
Posted on March 10, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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This is an excellent motion, placing restraint on the ability of the European Commission to conduct opaque negotiations that will effectively bind the European parliament before they have been exposed and reviewed. Looking forward to reading the highlights of the debate. If you have a fast-track to your MEP, this is worth mentioning to them.
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Lovely narrative around various patent activities from Jonathan Schwartz. Love the irony of using Google to link to Sun's search patent…
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Jay with an explanation of why the whole Drizzle team (working on the refactoring of MySQL to suit cloud computing) has moved to Rackspace (a cloud computing supplier). Makes perfect sense to me.
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What could /possibly/ go wrong? Can anyone remember cane toads in Australia? Usually it's only the software industry that releases dangerous bugs.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Cloud, Copyright, Drizzle, Environment, Knotweed, Patents | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Simon Phipps
§ I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.
Since I no longer work at Sun, I’d like to make clear what my “platform” is in this election in addition to my candidate statement. Continue reading →
Filed under: Open Source, OpenSolaris, Webmink | Tagged: Community, Election, FOSS, Governance, OGB, Open Source, OpenSolaris | 4 Comments »
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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European Parliament Written Declaration 12/2010 is now ready for signature. The Declaration establishes principles by which ACTA will be judged when it finally uncloaks and we discover how it is in fact armed. It’s time to use your preferred means to contact your MEPs and ask them to sign it.
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Maybe if they do a good job Oracle would consider retiring CDDL and using this instead?
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Paul Carr with a relatively fair and balanced view of the Digital Economy Bill – seductively so. But I don’t agree with his conclusions.
While the social contract behind copyright has merit (creating a protected ‘space’ where a copyright creation can be monetised in exchange for its dedication to the public domain), the digital age has driven a switch from a control-centric (‘hub-and-spoke’) society to an emergiunbg peer-to-peer society. There are no ‘fixes’ we can do to copyright to make it work right; we need to start again and invent a copyright for the digitial age.
The Digital Economy Bill is well intentioned, but there are no fixes available to make analogue copyright law work for a digital society and I fear the Bill will just make things worse, unleashing a “sorcerer’s apprentice” effect of unintended consequences the way the US DMCA has done. The Bill has to be stopped, not patched.
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A great potted history from Dries Buytaert, timeline-style.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: ACTA, Digital Economy Bill, Mozilla | Comments Off on ☞ Maintenance required
Posted on March 8, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence. Continue reading →
Filed under: Open Source, Webmink | Tagged: FOSS, Open Source, Sun | 130 Comments »
Posted on March 7, 2010 by Simon Phipps
§ I’m still listening to new music and it seems the proximity of SXSW is triggering a cascade of releases. Here are some samples from this week’s listening.
| Loc |
Title |
Artist |
Comments |
| UK |
Need Love |
Dr Meaker |
Laid back jazz-blues-funk with female vocals, rather than the dance track you might expect. |
| USA |
The Deep and Lovely Quiet |
SubtractiveLAD |
Dreamy, slightly metallic echo-acoustic of the shoe-gaze, Engineers variety. Would not be out of place in a Robert Rich concert. |
| USA |
Culpa De La Luna |
Rupa and the April Fishes |
Pretty delicious stuff – imagine early Madness as world music with female vocals and you’re maybe close |
| USA |
Let The Riverrun |
Carly Simon |
Verging on gospel, this is a great track from Carly Simon as she is now (rather than the blast from the past you usually get from her Best-Of fodder) |
Let me know what you think – I’ll keep listening and if people like the reports I’ll keep posting too.
Filed under: Links, Music | Tagged: Amazon, MP3, Music | Comments Off on ♫ Music To Soothe A Wild Mink
Posted on March 6, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Animation, Disney, FOSS, Open Source | Comments Off on ☞ End-Times?
Posted on March 5, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Official statement from OSI denouncing the IIPA’s warped view of the world that says developing nations should not be mandating open source while the US states and federal agencies get right along with the same thing. Very welcome statement that I know we’ll see Open Source For America reacting to – I hope other countries will also flag the issue with their US diplomatic contacts.
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Excellent paper from the EFF provides us with the lessons of history as the UK considers implementing similar bad legislation. It’s not so much the primary objectives of the law that are the problem (although those are pretty obnoxious). It’s the fact that, through careless drafting (or rather drafting with the assistance of the wrong lobbyists), a whole range of loopholes are created which lead to unintended consequences like censorship, anticompetitive litigation and early monopolisation. This really is a document I want my representatives to read.
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“Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP’s expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP’s were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to
http://www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP’s. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.”
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Wading into the “Special 301 list” debate I explored at great length last weekend, this posting introduces the great analogy of asking if the same complaints would apply if they related to an own vs rent model on cars instead of software: “But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be ‘distorting the market’ if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them.”
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If you’re a Carly Simon fan then this free track is a great gift from Amazon, assuming you have a US account with them.
Filed under: Links | Tagged: Digital Economy Bill, DMCA, IIPA, Open Source, OSI | 3 Comments »
Wild Webmink 