Open Source

I am not a big fan of Digital Rights Management (DRM), as anyone who reads my cyberscribblings is already aware of - yet I also recognize that it is necessary to assure that people are afforded choices if and when they decide to publish something. Lock it away so no one can use it, and no one will. Make it available to people, and people will read it. Make it available at no cost and you may see no returns; make it available at too high a cost and less people will buy it. Put it on only certain devices, and your market is limited to those with the devices.

Then there is the user perspective, where Fair Use is important but is increasingly trod upon. Consider the Amazon Kindle - it's all wonderful technology with people raving over how easy the device is to read from... but what if a friend wants to borrow the book? They have to borrow your Kindle. In the technology age, there isn't much in the way of Fair Use. In fact, it leads to a world where if you can't afford it - you can't have it.

The arguments for and against DRM are ancient in these times of technology. DRM is often bypassed, and even the sharp teeth of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act have trouble gaining purchase. What is a writer to do? What is a publisher to do?

What are we to do? We can rant and rave about it, which many of us have been doing for roughly a decade. This, as you probably can surmise by the present state of DRM, hasn't worked very well - though some people have managed to make a living off of ranting and raving (lunatics?). The days of, "Leave a Book, Take a Book" are pretty close to ending, unfortunately.

The Marlin Developer Community has taken a different approach, perhaps softening the blow of DRM.

Will it? { Read more }

As the story of open source licensing being upheld by copyright law bounces around the Internet, there's been quite a bit of commentary on it. Today, I came across yet another article which made a very important distinction. From How not to get sued by open source coders:

...Specifically, those policies should include a list of open source technologies in-house developers can use, a procedure for obtaining appropriate approvals for usage, and most importantly, a process for tracking the code. The latter – tracking how the code is used and modified – is often the root of the issue, said Abe, when a business wants to start selling its products.

But at the core of the court ruling, is the fact that the business had infringement on copyright – not just in breach of the license contract – by not following conditions imposed by the license agreement, like crediting the author, reference to copied files, a description of modifications to the original source, and where to find the original source...

I suppose that I've been using, writing and writing about Open Source and Free Software that I think that this is a no-brainer. That being said, it seems that at least a few organizations and companies are using open source code as Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS). And COTS is something that a lot of companies decide to use based on development and process tracking costs: if, for example, a company is trying to maintain a SEI level of 3 or better and they want to avoid having to track a project, they may plug in some COTS. { Read more }

Though I have been playing with Google Chrome, the lack of POP email access (accessing email outside of a browser) really handicaps my use of the internet. Granted, if we were to take a poll, I'm pretty sure that the masses flock to web service email - but I largely consider people who do so to be flirting with the Internet instead of using it. No offense, but using Google Chrome for me is a lot like hiring a blind person to sort M&Ms by color. I'm sure that the fellow can count M&Ms quickly, but I need that color sorting - and while I respect blind people (we could all be one at any point in time), I wouldn't hire them for that sort of work. Not only is it impractical, it's insensitive of me. So I apologize to Google Chrome as a browser. ;-)

Not everyone wants a stripped down browser. SeaMonkey, however, has email integrated within it - new kids on the web might think this is something new, but it isn't. Firefox and Thunderbird were born of an integrated parent much like Siamese twins - and in separating them, the Mozilla Foundation was fortunate that both twins survived. Yet there was a reason that they were born together... the value of splitting them up remains a question to me. Maybe they were going for a 'cool factor'. No idea. But with Seamonkey I get my email, I get my IRC (Chatzilla), I get my HTML editor, and... well, let me not get ahead of myself. { Read more }

While everyone has been going bonkers over the OLPC, it seems some folks in the-place-that-occupies-Tibet have truly made a $100 laptop:

In October, Shenzhen China-based HiVision will ship a MIPs-based Linux mini-notebook for $98. The company is currently offering a similar machine for $120, according to a video blog report from the Internationale Funkausstellunga (IFA) consumer electronics show in Berlin this week.

HiVision's current offering, the "mini-Note," appears to use one of the several MIPS-based processors now available from Chinese semiconductor vendors. It may use a Longsoon-2F chip, or perhaps the Ingenic Jz4740 Multimedia Application Processor, which powers Bestlink's $250 ($180 in volume) Alpha 400 mini-notebook and 3K's $300 RazorBook 400-Mini-Notebook, two other Linux-based models out of China. Both processors use MIPS-like cores...

Here's a link to the product.

Well, there it is - one of my predictions has come true. The OLPC's die-hardest advocates will say that the OLPC has a different mission, and yet that mission hasn't been very well documented and/or supported via infrastructure.

One laptop per child? Sure. Go for it. But the answer has never been in the laptops themselves, has it?

The big news yesterday on the Internet was - and will probably continue to be - the pre-launch announcement by Google on their new web browser which, according to the BBC, will be available on the morning of Wednesday 3rd September, PST.

The Google Chrome Comic Book really does tell an interesting story - if you're at least part geek. The manner in which the browser was designed and tested makes this developer very keen on trying it out. Of course, that means that the comic could be a really good infomercial as well - the proof will be in the using of the browser. But as far as getting me interested - as a good infomercial would - they had me at 'different processes'.

The whole idea, from a technology standpoint, was to rewrite the web browser in a modern context. This could be very good - web browsers are built on code and ideas that existed at the very start of the Internet as we know it and since then, we've been using browsers in ways that could not be foreseen. Web browsers are our portals to information available through different types of standards (and sometimes no standards). { Read more }

At least in the United States. Since I somehow missed that there was even a case going on, the BBC's ' Legal milestone for open source' was an interesting read for a Monday morning:

...The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online.

The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law.

"For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig.

"In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licences set conditions on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the licence disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer.

"This is a very important victory." ...

Doing some digging based on the article, I found the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) website that has a post on the legal victory dated August 13th, 2008 - and yes, they also have the ruling available as PDF.

The ruling shows that the case itself is not done: { Read more }

I remember the era before the spreadsheet, and I was fortunate enough to see Visicalc become the first 'killer app'. It transformed the way people did things, so much so that nowadays spreadsheets have become so mundane that you can pay for powerful spreadsheet software in software bundles - or get them at no cost in open source bundles. Offices use spreadsheets every day for things that were not possible before Visicalc; the computerized spreadsheet allowed people to do so much more automatically that it had a large part to play in personal computer adoption in businesses. In essence, it changed the world.

When I first revisited Kirix Strata in the context of Benford's Law, I was within a rut of thinking that had to do more with what I needed to do (cross referencing land tenancy records against receipts and introducing GIS) than anything else. That focus lead me toward Kirix Strata, and a lot of communication with Ken Kaczmarek and Aaron Williams of Kirix. I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Kirix Strata and started tossing my data at it. Ken and Aaron insisted that they do a webcast with me, and being in my rut of thinking I simply decided to entertain them. After all, how could it hurt? { Read more }

When Richard Jobity pointed me at How I got a Windows Vista refund from HP, I was not only happy to see that Hewlett-Packard had refunded the person who did not want to accept the Windows Vista End User License Agreement (EULA), I was impressed with the fact that the fellow had gotten his money back. While I am known for supporting Free Software and Open Source, that isn't really what pleased me. What pleased me is that someone took the path least traveled. It also pleased me that he is running Drupal.

Here's the thing: When you get a laptop, either you accept Microsoft's EULA - or not. Most people don't bother with even trying to say 'no' when the EULA pops up on the screen, they simply click through and say yes. Why? It is simply the easier thing to do; you can accept the EULA or just toss Linux on the machine. What you can't reasonably do is choose not to accept the EULA and get a refund for the software on the laptop. One person got a refund from Hewlett Packard because of persistence. They stayed on top of it, they did not budge.

Question: If you sell a product that has a precondition of use in accepting the license of a software package, but you do not have other options available to users who choose not to accept the license, is this really a choice?

This is apparently what Hewlett-Packard, as well as other computer manufacturers do. Leave all the Free Software/Open Source stuff on the side: They sell a product that asks a user if they will accept a software license after the product is purchased. That doesn't seem fair, it doesn't seem right and it most certainly doesn't seem like they care about their customers as much as Microsoft's EULA. Granted, they may be shooting products out with a shotgun for the masses, but if you offer a choice it should be legitimate. { Read more }