Quick Links for 8/29/2009
Why free software has poor usability, how to improve it Via Make, a revisit of a six year old essay. The newer version cites a much more diverse set of reasons than volunteers, scarce user design...
View ArticleSo Long Sam, Learning from the Open and the Infinite, and More
Learning how to leverage community from PHP’s success Glyn Moody links to an insightful interview with the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf. He quotes probably the most critical part, where Lerdorf...
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Software Freedom Day 2009
Chuck Frain Warms Up the Crowd Originally uploaded by cmdln Yesterday was Software Freedom Day. I was invited to speak at the Maryland Ubuntu Local Community by its leader, Chuck Frain. He suggested I...
View ArticleGet Your Personal Supercomputer, Asking Whether New Technology Makes Us...
Patent troll defamation case settled I was unaware of this case until Mike Masnick mentioned it on Techdirt earlier in the week. He asks the key question now that the case has been settled, whether...
View ArticleComplying with Free Software Licenses, Considering Whether Open Source Has...
Analysis of the Markey net neutrality bill A great post on Freedom to Tinker where David G. Robinson parses out the core problem with the bill, the particular standard and interpretation of...
View ArticleOpen Source Neural Networking Tool, Behavioral Ads without Tracking, and More
Pirate software moving from bit torrent to commercial hosting services This is hardly surprising news and will probably continue as long as there are newer services to which pirates can move. Or...
View ArticleDoctorow’s DIY Experiment, Asking Oracle to Let MySQL Go, and More
Hiccup over indexing, searching Google Voice messages The original story has been updated to clarify. The messages in question had been shared or posted publicly in some way by the account holders,...
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TCLP 2009-12-20 News
This is news cast 201, an episode of The Command Line Podcast. This week’s only security alerts is development of a counter tool to a forensics suite, COFEE, that Micrsoft offers but was leaked and the...
View ArticleBeware or You May Be Replaced with a Patent
Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center expressed surprise at a recently granted patent. So, when I look closely at these claims, I am appalled to discover this patent claims, as a novel...
View ArticleFSF Asking Google to Freely Release Newly Acquired Codec
In the wake of Google finalizing their acquisition of On2, the Free Software Foundation has wasted no time, according to The Register, in appealing to Google to release the VP8 codec under an...
View ArticleWikipedia’s Notability Requirement Fails for FLOSS
Jason Ryan sent me a link to his quick write up about the article for dwm, an early window manager, being flagged for removal under Wikipedia’s guidelines for notability. The notice appears to have...
View ArticleThe Framing Issue with RMS on SaaS
I am seeing some thoughtful commentary on RMS’s latest essay on the SaaS problem and even had some friends ask for my opinion. In brief, what Stallman is objecting to is software that performs some...
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TCLP 2010-04-11 News
This is news cast 211, an episode of The Command Line Podcast. In the intro, thanks to new donor this week, David. This week’s security alerts are a new site collecting privacy and security info on...
View ArticleCatchy Video Promoting Commons
Shareable has a link to this video, produced by On the Commons and The New Press. It is a catchy work, mentally sticky and short enough to make an excellent self contained meme. It pulls quotes from...
View ArticleDiaspora Proposal: Open Source, Distributed Social Network
I’ve seen a couple of people link to this, including EFF. Diaspora proposes to build a distributed, open source social network following a model that is very similar to WordPress and StatusNet. In fact...
View Articlefeeds | grep links > Moving ACTA to WIPO and MMORPG Released as Free Software
EU resolution calls for Canada to support moving ACTA to WIPO Professor Geist comments on Canada’s relative silence of ACTA lately. I was surprised to see the European Parliament crafting such a...
View ArticleNew Patent License for Free Software, Open Source
Slashdot links to a good explanation of how the Defensive Patent License will work. It is not the same as the GPL’s traditional patent clauses which have much in common with defensive patent pools....
View ArticleDeputizing Patent Trolls to Defend Free Software
I wrote a bit ago about DPL, a patent license to help defend free software and open source projects from those exploiting patents to suppress innovation and competition. Even though DPL is still at a...
View Articlefeeds | grep links > Still More on P and NP, Google Responds to Oracle’s Java...
Eight signs a claimed P != NP proof is wrong P vs. NP for dummies I don’t always follow Scott Aaronson’s explanations of quantum computation and classical mathematics and computer science but not for...
View ArticleLibrary at the Heart of Linux is Finally Free and Open
A nice bit of software archeology by Simon Phipps. Not just digging up the history of this old Sun code that was up until this month still under a restrictive license, but the challenges and Phipps’...
View ArticleHelp Support Free Video Formats
I saw via Groklaw’s news picks a plea for help over at the FSF. What they are looking for is the kind of advocacy and education work I actually rather enjoy. Rather than just declaiming creators should...
View Articlefeeds | grep links > iPhone Apps Leak Personal Data Too, Monitoring Employees...
Many top iPhone apps collect unique device ID I wondered about the reality of data leakage on the iPhone after last week’s story about a studio of Android apps that were snarfing up location data and...
View ArticleA Tithe for Free Software and Open Source
I spotted this via Hacker News, a proposal from the founder of DuckDuckGo. The idea is to develop another support model beyond corporate patronage and donation. Gabriel Weinberg is putting his money...
View ArticleFLOSS and Tech Geek BoF III at Balticon 45 – Updated
(Updated to correct the obviously wrong date.) For the past two years at Balticon, the annual convention run by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, I’ve organized an unofficial and largely ad hoc...
View ArticleMP3 Decoder Written in JavaScript
At firest I was a little puzzled by this Geek.com story to which Slashdot linked last night. HTML5 includes natively capabilities for playing back audio though not all formats are supported equally by...
View ArticleOutreach Program for Women
I have increasingly been reading, thinking and writing about the question of inclusion and diversity in the world of technology in general and within FLOSS more specifically. I am most in read and...
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