Sunday September 30, 2007 links for 2007-09-30
- YouTube - Raw Video: San Diego Mayor Sanders Supports Gay Marriage
Exceptionally moving video as San Diego's (Republican) Mayor admits in public he was wrong. It's a rare sample of that hackneyed fairytale movie ending happening in real life. Oh that more politicians would have the courage to do this in so many areas. - Customers are not ‘brand accessories’
Apple goes the way of Sony, attacking the people most likely to grow its market. - Making Money - Terry Pratchett
The new Pratchett just arrived from Amazon UK, it will be hot property around the house (although with both boys at University the competition is a much smaller pool!) - Bush seeks flexible CO2 targets
Seems Bush's conversion to environmentalism is only headline deep after all. - OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions
This is very cool. There's already a great catalogue of extensions after just a few days active.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 30 2007, 03:53:34 AM PDT )
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Friday September 28, 2007 links for 2007-09-28
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Excellent and rational article by George Greve that punctures the "penalty to innovation" frame some have put round the EU antitrust ruling.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 28 2007, 01:27:48 AM PDT )
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Thursday September 27, 2007 Roman Canaries
Today I had the privilege of speaking to a large and distinguished international audience in Rome, DFIR, considering the creation of a "Bill of Rights" for the Internet as a part of the ongoing IGF process. Many presenters spoke about privacy, about access to knowledge, about the need to build on the well-established corpus of wisdom in existing statements on human rights. Listening through the morning, it became apparent that most people were taking for granted the technical basis on which the Internet was created.
Thus in my speech I decided to take the opposite approach, taking as given the obvious need to establish human rights of privacy, access, free speech and non-discrimination and look at the technical foundations. The Internet exists because of three realities - informally constituted but still consistently real. We have to remember the heritage of the net if we are to protect higher-order rights for its future. Those are
- Open Standards - a Bill of Rights should establish the responsibility to ensure interface interoperability within every layer of the Internet's architecture, including the “application layer” and its myriad file formats, protocols, schemas, and application programming interfaces.
- Open Source - a Bill of Rights should establish the responsibility to ensure that is it legally, technically and practically possible for software applications to be equally available under both open source and propriety source code models.
- Open Access - a Bill of Rights should establish the responsibility to ensure the ability of any end-point on the network to connect to any other correctly configured end-point is available to every other end-point without unreasonable obstruction.
The Sentinel Principle
And so to canaries. It struck me during this that Free software plays an important role over and above delivering the liberty to use software one can inspect and alter. It also serves as the canary in the coalmine for the word "Open". Standards are truly open when they can be implemented without fear as Free software in an open source community. Open source communities are very sensitive to and wary of aspects of a standard that limit or otherwise harm their freedom. As the case of SenderID proved, they spot things for which others have a blind spot or have been gamed.
Whether or not you use the Free software itself, if it doesn't exist then the standard you're considering may well involve the sort of harmful, invisible agent that canaries were used to detect in an earlier age. I know there's plenty of discussion about the precise definition of "open standard" - maybe the best approach is not to define it but rather identify when it is not present using a sentinel.
I'd not want to confuse "Open Standards" with "Open Source" - their only link is that open standards implemented as open source create optimum freedom - but this additional sentinel role for software freedom just might be the answer to a tricky semantic issue in the current public policy arena.
No canaries were harmed in the preparation of this posting.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 27 2007, 09:23:23 AM PDT )
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Comments [3]
links for 2007-09-27
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My word, this smells bad. Will it never end? How much more is there to find?
Posted by webmink
( Sep 27 2007, 01:19:58 AM PDT )
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Wednesday September 26, 2007 links for 2007-09-26
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An FPGA big enough to burn a GPLed OpenSPARC core onto. Homebrew microprocessors suddenly become possible.
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Single core, four threads, presumably very very cheap since the design is GPL.
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Glyn has a very encouraging update listing the progress in various corners of OpenSolaris to come up with a full-strength redistributable OpenSolaris operating system.
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As well they might.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 26 2007, 01:27:06 AM PDT )
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Tuesday September 25, 2007 links for 2007-09-25
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We stayed here this weekend. It was a very elegant leap back to an earlier era of living, and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a british-seaside-family-holiday-experience.
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"Although mobile and XHTML now connects to everything a lot of the technology is proprietary and therefore difficult to integrate. Patents get in the way of everything and block the view," he said. Watch it get left behind by wireless VOIP.
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Excellent. It's fascinating watching the process of time turn people my parent's generation regarded as dross gradually being elevated to Dickens' status (or better, hopefully, I am not actually a Dickens fan).
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The graphic on this page is truly chilling as a vision of how the internet could work soon if we allow "net neutrality" to be framed as disallowing class-of-service rather than ensuring all end-points are accessible.
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I've decided to fix my sleep patterns. Watch out for me saying "no" to your late meeting or early morning flight. Nothing personal, I just want to survive.
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A bit early to be calling these shots since Symphony is just the existing Notes editing features made standalone (hence the huge resource requirements). Best to stick to OO.o for now, but IBM's contributions as they grow here are welcome.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 25 2007, 01:23:58 AM PDT )
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Monday September 24, 2007 links for 2007-09-24
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Wow. This has to be great news for just about everyone.
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The law starts to catch up with the warrantless surveillance programme in the US but it seems the government wants to use its power to cover up the problem.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 24 2007, 01:24:28 AM PDT )
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Saturday September 22, 2007 links for 2007-09-22
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NYT editorial rejects the frame that the publicists are promoting and points out that the issue is illegal abuse of a monopoly, not a choke on innovation. Bundling a media player harmed the real innovator, RealMedia.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 22 2007, 01:20:23 AM PDT )
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Thursday September 20, 2007 links for 2007-09-20
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Great to have Rich Sands (author the encyclopaedic OpenJDK FAQ) back to blogging again, and he's right in there with a tasty and controversial posting.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 20 2007, 01:24:47 AM PDT )
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Tuesday September 18, 2007 links for 2007-09-18
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Dutch government decides to standardise on ODF at all levels of government. This is a huge decision and one other governments will watch with interest. (in Dutch)
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While this seems the right result, it has taken so long to arrive that the market has already been shaped (not least by the unrelenting continuation of the attitude and behaviour that led to the original complaint).
Posted by webmink
( Sep 18 2007, 01:20:54 AM PDT )
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Monday September 17, 2007 Glassfish v2 swims free
News today from the Glassfish community is that their new version is released today, including the new version of Java DB (that's Sun's supported version of Apache Derby). There's a bunch of news from the team so go take a look. Meanwhile, it's interesting to see the maturity and scope of this open source project. The Free software at its heart is having a real impact, both by being widely used (even by competing projects) and by becoming a significant player in the Java EE market. Congratulations to the whole community!
Posted by webmink
( Sep 17 2007, 09:21:11 AM PDT )
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Sunday September 16, 2007 links for 2007-09-16
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More signs that Apple has decided it has enough market share to show its true proprietary colours.
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More proof that the patent system is in desperate need of reform, if anyone needed any more proof.
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Oblivious of the irony this journalist identifies - and welcomes - the injustice of imprisoning a man whose crime is to think in a way the rest of us abhor as the thing Orwell warned us about, but probably unaware of Orwell's book.
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Sounds plausible but then so does trepanation to some people.
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Great both to see Google taking an interest in standards and to see Zaheda leading the charge.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 16 2007, 01:22:20 AM PDT )
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Saturday September 15, 2007 links for 2007-09-15
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Amazed it has taken this long. The next steps should be interesting.
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Some people seem to have forgotten this continues to be fiction even if Dan Lyons did screw up and speak as himself and not in character at one point. I gather Peter Brown laughed uncontrollably when he read this one...
Posted by webmink
( Sep 15 2007, 01:20:02 AM PDT )
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Friday September 14, 2007 links for 2007-09-14
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Excess in excess.
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Interesting comments from Stephen (both by what he discusses and what he doesn't).
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It's Software Freedom Day on Saturday, and this is a nice summary of what it's about.
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Very funny, even if I disagree (I think the arrangement is reasonable enough and does no net harm to software freedom).
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This is spot on. Ringtones have been an abuse of customer lockin up until now and now the iPhone age is here they are instead an abuse of customer trust.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 14 2007, 01:25:07 AM PDT )
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