Thursday, April 19, 2007
Bloggers Call for Open Source Lobbyists & Advocacy
Bloggers Call for Open Source Lobbyists & Advocacy
Via a post by Lora Bentley @ IT Business Edge, April 18, 2007
A Florida legislator’s efforts to insert pro-open source/open standards language into a bill that would create an enterprise information technology office in the state’s executive branch were foiled by lobbyists from Microsoft, according to Linux.com.
Rep. Ed Homan added text to Senate Bill 1974 that advocated the state’s adoption and implementation of systems that support open formats. Shortly after, it appears Microsoft’s men arrived at the Florida Legislature to convince its members that the addition to the bill was not a good idea.
Linux.com has now urged its readers to take up the cause of open source in Florida. So has ZDNet Dana Blankenhorn in a post.
Via a post by Lora Bentley @ IT Business Edge, April 18, 2007
A Florida legislator’s efforts to insert pro-open source/open standards language into a bill that would create an enterprise information technology office in the state’s executive branch were foiled by lobbyists from Microsoft, according to Linux.com.
Rep. Ed Homan added text to Senate Bill 1974 that advocated the state’s adoption and implementation of systems that support open formats. Shortly after, it appears Microsoft’s men arrived at the Florida Legislature to convince its members that the addition to the bill was not a good idea.
Linux.com has now urged its readers to take up the cause of open source in Florida. So has ZDNet Dana Blankenhorn in a post.
Labels: advocacy, microsoft, problems, usa
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Microsoft: Never Really Helping Open source
Microsoft: Never Really Helping Open source
16 April 2007, SDA India
It is Microsoft once again against open source! (So what's new?). This time, it is over their ClearType technology. The reason why the fonts are better in Windows as compared to Linux is the ClearType technology that Windows uses. Doug Schaefer feels that Microsoft is never going to extend the patent protection on ClearType to all of the Linux community, and that in the fuzz between ClearType and FreeType, and between open source and software patents, it is the user who pays the price.
Read this brief news item @ SDA India
16 April 2007, SDA India
It is Microsoft once again against open source! (So what's new?). This time, it is over their ClearType technology. The reason why the fonts are better in Windows as compared to Linux is the ClearType technology that Windows uses. Doug Schaefer feels that Microsoft is never going to extend the patent protection on ClearType to all of the Linux community, and that in the fuzz between ClearType and FreeType, and between open source and software patents, it is the user who pays the price.
Read this brief news item @ SDA India
Labels: microsoft, patents, problems
What makes an open source Project successful?
What makes an open source Project successful?
16 April 2007
Is the enthusiasm for open source software projects a "bubble" ready to burst and take the model down with it? That's what the CEO of one of the most successful open source projects thinks...
"Right now, open source is hot," said Rod Johnson, author of the Spring Java development framework and CEO of Interface21, the company he founded to market it. Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but "capitalism will inevitably reassert itself" and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving "open source zombies"--unsupported, unmaintained projects--he predicts.
But wait! All is not lost. In his opinion, while the majority of open source projects will fade into obscurity, companies and products that have the critical mass of customers, developers, and employees and financially viable business models could yet make the open source paradigm a force to reckon with.
Read this interesting article from IT News Australia
16 April 2007
Is the enthusiasm for open source software projects a "bubble" ready to burst and take the model down with it? That's what the CEO of one of the most successful open source projects thinks...
"Right now, open source is hot," said Rod Johnson, author of the Spring Java development framework and CEO of Interface21, the company he founded to market it. Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but "capitalism will inevitably reassert itself" and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving "open source zombies"--unsupported, unmaintained projects--he predicts.
But wait! All is not lost. In his opinion, while the majority of open source projects will fade into obscurity, companies and products that have the critical mass of customers, developers, and employees and financially viable business models could yet make the open source paradigm a force to reckon with.
Read this interesting article from IT News Australia
Labels: business-models, opinion, problems, trends
Thursday, April 5, 2007
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
Labels: analysis, perspectives, problems, project-management, social-networking
Monday, April 2, 2007
The commons problem and open source
The commons problem and open source
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ March 29th, 2007
Between them open source and the Internet represent the greatest expansion of the commons in history.
A commons is shared. It is available to all. And in America today, most of our commons are trashed.
These same problems are prevalent on the Internet. Spammers, scammers, hackers, and p2p file hoarders use far more bandwidth than all legal, legitimate users combined.
We adapt well to all these things. We find new business models in them...says Dana in this interesting post. Read the full post here @ ZD Net blogs
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ March 29th, 2007
Between them open source and the Internet represent the greatest expansion of the commons in history.
A commons is shared. It is available to all. And in America today, most of our commons are trashed.
These same problems are prevalent on the Internet. Spammers, scammers, hackers, and p2p file hoarders use far more bandwidth than all legal, legitimate users combined.
We adapt well to all these things. We find new business models in them...says Dana in this interesting post. Read the full post here @ ZD Net blogs
Labels: analysis, commons, problems
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