Tuesday July 31, 2007 links for 2007-07-31
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Dalibor spots the unresolved tension in Microsoft's position. And that's being generous.
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"There are far better ways to protect the intellectual property rights of software developers than to take away their right to use fundamental building blocks."
Posted by webmink
( Jul 31 2007, 01:25:15 AM PDT )
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Monday July 30, 2007 links for 2007-07-30
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Sun as circus freak.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 30 2007, 01:21:27 AM PDT )
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Friday July 27, 2007 links for 2007-07-27
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Jason finds another defect in IBM's patent covenant that I'd overlooked. This one is one Microsoft did originally as well and fixed after I (and presumably others) pointed it out. I hope Bob is keeping track and planning a v2 soon.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 27 2007, 01:24:08 AM PDT )
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Thursday July 26, 2007 links for 2007-07-26
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"I've asked our investor relations (known as "IR") and press relations ("PR") teams to gear up to announce our results via Sun's web site and RSS feeds" Great step forward in trasparency, breaking the monopoly of the newswires.
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These look very cool. When I'm snorkelling I wear waders that have a seperate big toe, these could be even better.
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I didn't notice O'Reilly in the GPLv3 conversation, probably the only significant commentator apart from Linus without representation. I have a lot of admiration for Eben's courage in speaking truth to power, and in Tim's humility this morning responding.
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As if Apple doesn't have enough control of their customers already: "unless you are the rightful owner of a device, DCM will make sure you can't charge it up once the batteries run down."
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Great move, and at a panel here at OSCON they also confirmed they are dropping their badgeware policy. Way to go, guys.
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Another OpenSolaris language community opens its doors (portas).
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I regard this compromise as a sad erosion of the freedoms we all expect from Free software in open source communities - I'll explain more in a full posting.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 26 2007, 01:21:29 AM PDT )
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Wednesday July 25, 2007 Redefining Open Source?
There was a panel today at OSCON on Who gets to decide what open source means and it reminded me of experiences at Sun when I started in my current role. I kept meeting with marketing folks who thought "open source" was purely descriptive, and that they could define it any way that suited them. Each time I'd tell them no, that's not what Sun does, Sun only calls things "open source" when they are licensed using licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative as complying with the Open Source (License) Definition.
It's true that there's more to open source than that, but the overwhelming consensus of what Eben Moglen called the "republic of open source" is that a conforming license is a baseline requirement. They'd argue for a while, but in the end it always came down to this: if open source didn't mean something already, you'd not want to use the phrase for marketing. I didn't let the marketeers mess with it and neither should you.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 25 2007, 04:44:12 PM PDT )
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links for 2007-07-25
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I just signed and would invite all my British readers to consider this petition. Access to this resource should be available for all license-fee payers, and there should not be a requirement to use a particular commercial product.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 25 2007, 01:24:09 AM PDT )
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Tuesday July 24, 2007 links for 2007-07-24
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A contribution to a debate I am following somewhere about whether a certain operating systems needs to be made user-friendly enough to do what the user expects rather than what the designer intends.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 24 2007, 01:26:54 AM PDT )
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Monday July 23, 2007 links for 2007-07-23
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So what is the first thing much of the world will do on seeing this? Yes, they will use $search-engine to find a copy. When will people learn that censorship (at least this sort of indignant, officious censorship) fails in the internet age?
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A new album from Suzanne Vega. Downloading now...
Posted by webmink
( Jul 23 2007, 01:20:44 AM PDT )
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Saturday July 21, 2007 links for 2007-07-21
- U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes
“Taking lighters away is security theater,” Mr. Hawley said. “It trivializes the security process.” (Kip Hawley is assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration). Yes, TSA really said "security theatre". - CIFS Client Source
Sun contributes the source of a CIFS/SMB client to OpenSolaris under CDDL. - W3C Efficient XML Interchange Public Draft Available
I remember in 1997 one of the criticisms of XML being its verbosity; amazing it has taken this long for a solution to that issue to be standardised. - BBC Hoist By Its Own Petard
"So DRM is pointless for both groups, and hence pointless for everyone. Moreover, it not only inconveniences the law-abiding majority, it locks some of them out entirely, in the case of Mac and GNU/Linux users." - Sun adds compiler to JavaFX platform
Yes, a compiler for JavaFX, based on javac.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 21 2007, 04:01:48 AM PDT )
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Friday July 20, 2007 links for 2007-07-20
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Best US phone-number lookup service yet.
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The vote is in in South Africa.
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IBM tries to tag AIX as 'open' when it's nothing of the sort. "It sounds to me like IBM wanted to get the "OSS Bump," where anything associated with the term open source gets more notice from the tech media and the media readers."
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First-hand account from the Sun office in New York, which is next to the site of the steam explosion.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 20 2007, 01:21:31 AM PDT )
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Thursday July 19, 2007 BSC Is Miscellaneous
Judging by the statistics I watch for my blog, the majority of my readers may well never visit the home page for Sun's bloggers. But it may be worth a visit today becuase we've just introduced two features that help you benefit from the miscellaneousness of the site.
One is the tag cloud. We've had tagging as an option on blogs.sun.com for quite a while now, but today the team has turned on a master tag cloud for the whole site. Use it to look for themes and trends across the whole corpus of Sun bloggers.
The other is the New Bloggers list (over in the right-hand column). We have thousands of bloggers here and when new ones emerge they often have trouble getting noticed. They'll now be featured for a while so they can be spotted.
These are both features that make use of the "miscellaneousness" of the site, to use a term from David Weinberger's excellent book Everything Is Miscellaneous. He argues that in the participation age, it is best to impose order as late as possible rather than to try to include a pre-conceived notion of order in the structure of the data. The book is well worth adding to your reading list.
Update: Spooky. Seems Tim was recommending the book the same instant I was...
Posted by webmink
( Jul 19 2007, 04:31:46 PM PDT )
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Wednesday July 18, 2007 links for 2007-07-18
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Onno Kluyt relinquishes the chair of the JCP and Patrick Curran assumes it.
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Our rights get eroded case-by-case. The mistake was to allow camera-based systems in the first place. This is how rights disappear - not in one move but in step-by-step erosion.
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Italian vote is completed, it seems.
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That's the new test for whether something is a threat for TSA staff, it seems.
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Shocking news, many of us flew this route very recently and it's far too easy to imagine.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 18 2007, 01:27:42 AM PDT )
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Tuesday July 17, 2007 links for 2007-07-17
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It has taken a long time for questions of integrity to be raised over "reality TV" despite "The Truman Show". I wonder how long it will take for equal questions of trust over iPlayer giving a vendor a new monopoly?
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"Items dispatched on 15 Jul 2007: Delivery estimate: 21 Jul 2007" Hopefully it will be delivered before I leave for OSCON...
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Wow. I'll have to check up on this.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 17 2007, 01:22:52 AM PDT )
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Sunday July 15, 2007 links for 2007-07-15
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Yep, they are already listing Leopard for pre-order on Amazon.com
Posted by webmink
( Jul 15 2007, 01:19:20 AM PDT )
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