Now that Sinn Fein and the DUP are on the verge of an agreement (BBC news item here) could the parties to the free v. open wrangle at least agree not to provide ammunition for this kind of piece in Information Week (or anywhere else!). No doubt the protagonists will brand the report […]
This jargon-free piece in the highly prestigious MIT Technology Review is just the thing to show your boss, partner, MP, … or anyone important who thinks FLOSS is just for geeks.
… reviewed in a long piece from from PC Advisor.
The first £50 OLPC laptops could ship to children in emerging economies within months. PC Advisor speaks to the people behind the project to see how they made the impossible possible. When plans to build and distribute a £50 laptop to schoolchildren in emerging economies […]
According to this piece in the Indy
Major music companies look set to put pressure on the iPod maker Apple to make its proprietary anti-piracy system compatible with music players manufactured by other companies.
While Mr Jobs has called on the music majors - Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music - to abandon DRM altogether, the […]
At least that is what the Daily Telegraph says.
Just in case you have missed the more than 200 stories on the Web, go here, or here, or here or … , to read about the world-wide brouhaha caused when
Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it […]
… for BT (here) and CISCO (here).
This piece broke the news that
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!
causing an explosion of blogging on the topic. Wikiasari Mania - The Facts, The Myths & Hysteria! are analysed here, […]
How about this as a measure of UK insularity: looking into the background an innocent-looking post we came upon this from Valencia:
Regional Council for Infrastructures and Transportation (CIT) put out to public tender the development and implementation of a new software application for the management of geographic information (GIS). Some of its most outstanding features […]
… is the somewhat faintly praising title of this piece on the legalities of open source licencing viewed from within the English legal system.
So says Victor Keegan in this piece in today’s Technology Guardian extolling the virtues of the Open Rights Group, PledgeBank, writetothem.com, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/, and the all-round general good guys at MySociety.
A timely example of this impact comes in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property which
recommends introducing a strictly limited ‘private copying’ exception to enable […]
The Gowers report on IP in the UK is published on Wednesday; in this piece sets out the issues, mentioning open source.
This is just a fascinating read:
These are some pretty raw notes from Negroponte’s presentation at NetEvents, Hong Kong, as it happens. He’s showing off the first “production laptop” - although it’s not the finished electronics. An ASIC - to run the camera, the flash memory and other functions - isn’t fitted, and it’s not possible […]
This item in Ars Technica highlights an essay by Rufus Pollock with the same title. We post ourselves, without added value or irony, to urge our readers to read Rufus’s essay (available here, free registration required).
Last time it was the EU dishing out money; this time it is the NSF.
… else we shall most assuredly hang separately” said Benjamin Franklin in 1776 when the USA were the little guys facing the over-wheening power of the British government. According to Bruce Perens, the GPL encapsulates these sentiments for free and open source software facing a software patent aggressor. Who could he possibly have […]
The first $100 laptop has been produced - story here.
A fascinating tour of its Linux interface, courtesy of YouTube, starts here.
UK-based OpenStreetMap.org is appearing increasingly on the news feeds; here and here for instance and here with pictures. The Guardian’s “Free Our Data” campaign has had a lot to say about
Ordnance Survey’s transition from a directly funded government body to a “trading fund”, run as a quasi-business
… but an interesting light on the anthropology of open source.
A consortium consisting of leading European Open Source projects, consultants and research bodies has secured EU funding to measure the quality of Open Source software.
Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) has raised €3.2 million to build tools that will enable software companies and Open Source projects to benchmark the quality of their application’s […]
Creative Match reports that
The BBC and Microsoft Corp have taken a step toward strengthening their working alliance and exploring digital opportunities for next generation broadcasting
Two of the finest pedigrees of the digital age have come together to explore the new media terrain which companies must now traverse.
Is there a reader in the know […]