Fiercely Independent

Tuesday Jan 10, 2006

OK, so I whined about Mr Tom Adelstein's curious assertion that the open source community needs to "protect its brand". Implicit in this was that the FSF should approve open source licenses, and not the OSI, and that many corporations, and specifically my employer (whose views those expressed here may not necessarily reflect), are duping developers into working for free.

Incidentally, in Mr Adelstein's piece I found it very odd that a GPL advocate was using terms like "brand", while a more business-oriented article was rather diffident in its use of the term "intellectual property". What would Ms Naomi Klein make of it all I wonder?

Anyway, in today's Independent there is a piece about the top open source web sites. The thing is, I'm not sure what an an open source web site is. Some of them seem to be the web sites of open source projects and some of them are collaborative activities based on the internet (what some people, and generally those more impervious to ridicule than myself, are calling "Web 2.0"). Happily, I think that the open source movement will survive this modest malapropism.

Interesting article though. And everyone should try Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP, amongst others, before unsheathing their credit card. It was surprising that there was no mention of Linux or even dare I say it, OpenSolaris.

Still, I love the Indie. Over Christmas, the Guardian included a piece on positives and negatives about the year. One such negative was that the Conservatives were, for the first time since a brief stint in 2001 (I think it was), ahead of Labour in the opinion polls. This sums up all that is wrong with thinking on what remains of the British left these days. As long as we're in power, we must be doing something right. Wrong. And you won't find such nonsense in the Independent. I mean, who can speak for a government that has enacted laws like this one? Arrested for remembering war dead at the Cenotaph? Adrian Mitchell's sombre poem To Whom It May Concern seems even more relevant now than when it was written.

Hmmm. Enough self-righteous indignation: I've got the rest of the week off and I'm on a one-way ticket to Sweden and back. (It's all Darkness there this time of year, see?).

ps. these views may not necessarily reflect those of my employer.