brainstorms

Thursday February 17, 2005

literacy, osi, etc.

i just read some vacuous, humorous commentary on OSI licenses, but not surprised: these are still the source salad days in some, less imaginative (and incidentally less relevant) parts of the industry. going from not being able to spell G P L without turning blue to commenting on the usefulness of OSI licenses for the future: this is a remarkable development in literacy, sort of like watching my six-year old making his way through a grade-1 reading curriculum:

the source began to glow.
the magic was working.
"oh help!" said biff.

the magic was working.
the trolls got smaller and
smaller and smaller.

related reading, written for adults: lawrence rosen's Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. it has excellent coverage of reciprocal (GPL), academic (BSD, MIT etc) and alternative (MPL, CPL, OSL etc) licenses, alternative models to open source etc. highly recommended.

[addendum: i was very pleased to note that russ nelson will be the new president of OSI. congratulations, russ.]

(2005-02-17 20:53:13.0) Permalink Comments [0]

i, robot

[no, not the asimov book, not the recent movie]

cory doctorow's new short story i, robot is here at infinite matrix. the story title is no accident: [quoting doctorow]

Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives.

(2005-02-17 09:25:54.0) Permalink Comments [0]