Anywhere in San Francisco we can get some of these to try next week? I'd love to have a bowl of them at our open source party at the Thirsty Bear on Tuesday evening.
Another country standardises on ODF. I wonder how many it takes before there's demonstrated "demand"? I expect the response to be "they can always use a plug-in" but really that's just insulting.
If you live in Australia or New Zealand please do come to this event where I'll be delivering the opening keynote. If there are enough you are interested, let's also go for a long table meal at The Sailor's Thai in The Rocks...
It's not just AGPL. There are other licenses (like CDDL for instance) that are blocked for business reasons that get dressed up as social reasons. Seems OSI is not a respected arbiter of license soundness in this case.
Another Paul Graham essay that is so good that it sounds obvious. Here he's asserting that the best plan for a startup is to behave like a non-profit and just serve people. Nicely complementary to the 37Signals video I posted here recently.
A shameful indictment of DRM as another DRM-using-customer-hating-corporation changes strategy and leaves its customers to twist in the wind. Just don't buy stuff that's got digital restriction management as this event is inevitable for all services.
This looks like a positive step, likely to bring new money into iStock and make it flow more freely towards photographers. I'll need to resume uploads (I need the rejection slips!)
Given the E51 is now standard issue for Sun in Europe I guess lots of people will need one of these, given Nokia neither made the thing charge from the mini-USB connector it uses to connect to the computer nor included this dongle.
As I recall, MySQL has had non-Free software in its service/subscription cloud for quite a long time, so I'm a bit puzzled why it's suddenly become an issue. Maybe as part of Sun there's no longer cause for a suspension of judgment?
Strength or weakness of the open source model? My take is it will just validate Google without ptoviding serious competition since it offers no deployer security (as in confidence, not as in hackproofness).
The story explaining why Steve Pepper was motivated, after 13 excellent years as chair of the Norwegian SC34 mirror committee, to resign and to organise a public protest.
Matt stays calm and makes good points here. Ultimately, offering closed tools as part of the service cloud around an open source platform can help pay the bills only if it can be done without harming adoption.
This has more legs than I thought, must be a slow news period. Note I am arguing from an adoption-led position about how there must be no artificial barriers to deployment - I am aware of the Free Software issues (warning: Sys-Con article)
"Awkward silences aside, we've now got a very productive engagment with the customer around delivering commercial support on a global basis to what's turned out to be the most popular database inside their development shop." Adoption-led.
Fascinating exploration of the dynamics and evolution of community governance. Having see how the jump to formal governance affected OpenSolaris, we're now taking out time over OpenJDK, and this study supports that approach.
Sitting in the hotel (right next to Herr Nielsen's Jazz Club) last night in Oslo I realised that the music I was listening to on my laptop was just track after track of Norwegian music. There was Beady Belle, then Thomas Dybdahl (try Damn Heart or Half Of Me, both free B-sides, and my absolute favourite single Love Story), then Ane Brun - and that's ignoring nearby Scandinavians like Teitur and Tina Dico (try this. Wonder how I'd missed the connection for so long?
Update: As Walter points out, I forgot the most obvious musician (and the one who features largest in my collection), Jan Garbarek.
(From Personal Mink on Sat Apr 12 01:12:00 BST 2008)
I've been speaking at the excellent Go Open 2008 conference here in Oslo today - attendees may be interested in my slides. My talk embodied the comments I made in response to Michael Tiemann a while back.
Of much more interest was what happened at lunchtime, however. I've heard plenty of accusations from certain OOXML proponents that all the noisy opposition to them is coming from extremist agitators and anarchists and should be ignored as a consequence. The (very un-Norwegian) activities in Oslo today seemed to suggest otherwise. As the International Herald Tribune reports, there was a demonstration and protest march by placard-wielding demonstrators on the streets of Oslo - see the local TV report. This in itself is unusual - Norway is not given to such outbursts - but there's more that makes it unusual.
This protest was organised not by extremist agitators but by Steve Pepper (who made a great speech), the widely respected chair of the SC34 mirror committee that reviewed OOXML for Standards Norway and by his colleagues. I asked them why they were taking this unusual step and they told me it was because the majority view of their committee had been ignored by Standards Norway. They are furious - Pepper has resigned. So there may be extremists involved in the protests against OOXML somewhere, but in the specific case of Norway the protesters are highly respected standards and business people who have been driven to extremes rather than starting from them.
Podcast Interview With Trond Heier
I also had the chance to interview the CEO of Linpro AS, a respected Norwegian open source service provider, about his reasons for taking part in the protest. You can listen to the podcast in either MP3 or Ogg format. Trond explains that the message Steve Pepper delivered was in English so that the Norwegian group could encourage other, similarly unhappy groups in other countries to speak out as well. The protest was held outside the building where JTC1 SC34 was holding a meeting.
More pictures:
If you are a writer looking for photos or clips for your article or blog, you are free to use any of these as long as you attribute them to me. I'd also prefer you to link to this blog posting too.
