A team of US academics has been given $750,000 to study the collaborative process by which open source software is produced:
The team will focus on the Apache Web server, the PostgreSQL database and the Python scripting language. They intend to collect information from message boards, bug reports and e-mail discussion groups to build up a […]
Gervase Markham of Mozilla used his regular column in The Times this week to flag the issue of UK citizens paying twice, once as taxpayers, once as consumers, for data gathered by the UK government.
I was travelling on Virgin Trains over the bank holiday, and thought I’d left my return ticket on the outward train. […]
Forbes Magazine, the self-proclaimed “tool of captalism”, has been taking a look at the role of OSS in creating a “cheap revolution” - note that it won’t be free, one has to make money after all - and focusing on the potential for disruption and threats to established companies.
There are articles on the threat to […]
The Financial Times has a rather philosophical column this week on the growing academic acceptance of the idea that human beings have a tendency to behave rather less rationally than traditional economic theory expects. We are more risk averse than we perhaps should be, it seems, and have tendency to underestimate the benefits and overestimate […]
Rather off the usual track beaten by posts here, some readers might be interested in the July issue of the learned journal Management Science which is devoted to “research on the open source phenomenon”.
Every once in a while, an example comes along that shows important new possibilities so clearly that the world […]
The case for digital rights, encompassing such issues as web privacy and freedom of speech, was laid out this week by Becky Hogge in The New Statesman, who argues that, in order for them to be given the attention they deserve, we need to “make them sexy”:
The truth is, it’s the politics that keeps digital-rights […]
IBM launched a new Research and Development Management consultancy practise this week which aims to help companies innovate using techniques cribbed from the open source model.
Mel Weems, global practice leader for the new R&D Management practice, told internetnews.com that companies can “create a new game-changing play in the market by bringing together operational innovation, business […]
So say Trend Micro - and they should know, they make anti-virus software - for reasons that go to the heart of the open source development model.
Trend claimed that one reason open source software has fewer security issues is the variety of Linux distributions. Although they use the same kernel, if one distribution is compromised […]
Fresh from threatening schools with the heavies over software licensing, The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) stands accused today of attempting to indoctrinate schoolchildren.
The industry group, set up 20 years ago to lobby parliament and raise awareness of copyright issues around software, announced on Wednesday a partnership with Thomas Telford school in Shropshire which would […]
From Computer Weekly:
MPs have told the government that it should not legislate to make digital rights management systems mandatory.
The recommendation from the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group follows its inquiry into digital rights management (DRM), which considered evidence from publishers, the film and music industries, lawyers and others.
More at The Reg.
You can find the report […]
FOSS advocates on either side of the pond came over all patriotic this week with both Americans and Yurpeans staking their claim on the philosophical heart-and-soul of open source.
Eben Moglen, lawyer for the FSF and founder of The Software Freedom Law Centre, took the opportunity provided by a keynote address at Red Hat’s user conference […]
As the Ubuntu community gears up for next month’s release of Dapper Drake, founder Mark Shuttleworth’s for-profit open source company, Canonical Ltd., is preparing up to offer commercial support for the distro. The company already offers certification and Desktop Linux questions whether they have what it takes to position Ubuntu as a serious player in […]
Hollywood beckons for the collaborative Project Orange as the movie Elephants Dreams, created using open source software such as Blender3D and the GIMP, gets its DVD release.
The content of the movie, including production files such as models and textures, will be made under the Creative Commons 2 licence and are to be included on […]
Eben Moglen, the legal head honcho at the FSF, seems to spend half his life being interviewed by ZDNet. During the latest sitting, he described OSS as “a big pile of golden eggs” which is not “incompatible with capitalism,” referring to various infamous claims from the likes of SCO and Microsoft.
As if to illustrate […]
The dubiously-named Extreme Nano (sounds like a skateboard to me) has a piece on a plan from not-for-profit Sun spin-off GELC to “open source” education with “self-paced, Web-based, free and open content.”
Martin Brampton, over at Silicon.com, has called on the UK government to embrace more enthusiastically not only the fruits of the open source community, but also the ideas driving it.
Gervase Markham is in the Times again with some thoughts on the announcement from AOL and Yahoo of their new pay-per-message, spam-blocker-busting email service. Of course, Markham is not the only one to express concern over the creation of a two-teir system; the Beeb carried an essay critical of the move by internet law expert […]
Skype and Google have chucked a large quantity of readies at Spanish tech startup Fon Technology SL, a kind of wi-fi Napster keen on revolutionary imagery (check out the design on their site) who have adopted the quasi-Bolivarian name “foneros” for those subscribing to their service.
This introduction is courtesy of The Mobile Weblog…
If you […]
… and he’s been telling everyone who’ll listen. ZDNet’s in-house Microsoft contrarian John Caroll, on the other hand, had some very bad words for the new license, and for Richard Stallman in particular, that were just a hair’s breadth from the c-word*.
* “communism”
He’s been warning a conference on the subject that the technology could lead to a vendor lock-in in a similar way to that which afflicts the console market.
“What we’ve seen so far in the games console industry has been directed as if users are scum — ‘this console has lots of fancy hardware so you […]