Tag Archives: Open Source

Patents, Innovation Tax

Posted on by
1

So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

“Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab.”

Posted on by
1

This is a hot button issue for me.

[U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
Greg Sandoval, “Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’“, cnet

What is “clean and simple” is

  • That’s propaganda.
  • Piracy happens on the high seas, or in Disney movies.
  • Nothing smashed nor grabbed. Property is a physical concept. There is no loss of property from copyright violations.
  • There is room for fair use.

I don’t recommend using or distributing works that you don’t have license to.

I do recommend getting involved in Free Culture and Open Source.

One of my great inspirations is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

Quake Commitment

Posted on by
6

For those software developers and companies where open source doesn’t quite fit their business plan, how about a Quake Commitment?

“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software

Blurred Computer Commands in Green on a Black Screen

Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack

I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.

Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?

Better Email Please

Posted on by
2

The Internet’s oldest software application, the email client, could be better.

I find Google Gmail the best for my own workflow, but it is ripe with complexity and user experience issues.

Well over an five hour ago I emptied from trash a huge amount of email. Since then I couldn’t log back in till just now:
gmail-temporary-error-5033.png

Text copy:

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Try Again Sign Out

This happens to a lesser extend every time I delete a large number of emails. I understand Google doesn’t like deleting things — they want to to organize the world’s information — but every time it leaves me upset.

Space and search are Gmail’s killerest feature, so it shouldn’t be unexpected that people would use it as a temporary data store of huge amounts of information.. Here I am trying to make excuses for them. It’s unacceptable that any action can take your email down for hours.

I recently tried Thunderbird 3– I really want to love it — but felt like I was in configuration hell. It would have taken days to get it as usable as Gmail already is for me.

A lot of colleagues and friends get a lot of milage from Apple Mail, but Mark Pilgrim’s “Juggling Oranges” rings in my ears. The articles describes Mark walking away from Mac for an completely open source stack, “Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. ”

Why is individual emails still the focus on email? Instead of bigger picture collaboration with people?

Anyone dreaming of the fabled open source Mac mail client Letters.app? Synovel Spicebird looks intriguing.

Being Part of It

Posted on by
2

Being allowed to make it my own, to make it “better”, to collaborate, to be human, is what makes me passionate about open source and free culture.

This bug was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Probably not many people had ever run into it. But after hours of puzzling over those broken image tags, it felt darned good to find it, and — more importantly — squash it. And after the release of WordPress 3.0, nobody will have to scratch their heads over it again. Yay me!
Dougal Campbell, “Bug Chasing“, March 7th, 2010

Government for the People Makes You Special

Posted on by
Reply

“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!

WordPress Declaration of Independence

Posted on by
1

The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.

About Web page, WordPress Foundation

There are already a lot of great comments on the welcome post “Getting off the ground“. Here is a one of the many juicy comments made by Matt in response to a question posted there:

Sure, as a quick summary: [Wordpress.com and the WordPress Foundation] completely separate, but share a similar name and my involvement. One is for-profit, the other non-profit. They both have similar goals in terms, but the Foundation can take a long-term multi-decade approach to solving these problems without regard for short term profit, market conditions, or shareholders. I’ve always had a vision for two simultaneous approaches to the WordPress way, the heart and the mind, but it’s just now coming together.

Free and Open Source from the Roots Up

Posted on by
5

“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, Hosted on Flickr, CC by

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!

Everything In Our Power

Posted on by
Reply

WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.

Matt Mullenweg, September 5, 2009, “How to Keep WordPress Secure“,

Do read the rest of the potent post — articulate, insightful, and honest.

GPL Isn’t a Good License for Proprietary Software

Posted on by
5

Yesterday, I wrote about the clarification regarding WordPress Themes and the GPL (v2). Daniel Jalkut, who I featured as a personal WordPress Hero earlier this year, wrote one of the most interesting responses to “[WordPress] Themes are GPL, too“. Written on Thursday and temporarily taken offline by the fireball, Daniel’s “Getting Pretty Lonely” article laments that WordPress is GPL, and that any open source software that uses a GPL license discourages developer community participation.

At first this article left me very upset, maybe because I found it quite persuasive, but then I reflected that for anyone developing and selling proprietary software, Daniel’s is the only position to believe in and promote.