At the end of September, Matt Asay wrote a provocative post: Free software is dead. Long live open source. He argued that, while “free software advocates provided the early backbone,” that “ideological” approach has given way to the more realistic “pragmatism” of open source and that “we’re all the better for it.” A month later, [...]
Father Thomas Rosica is the founder and CEO of Salt and Light, which, aside from being a TV station, has a fantastic blog. He posts often, and I enjoy his posts. But sometimes, it seems like he just doesn’t understand the Internet. I hope the Catholic News Service just took his comments out of context, [...]
On November 14th, 2009, I was invited to give a speech at a tribute to Brother Domenic, principal of De La Salle College “Oaklands” from 1996 to 2009. I graduated from De La Salle in 2005. In March of 2004, sitting in English class, Mr. Hunt told us that we were all schizophrenic. We were [...]
I’ve tightened up my post on why free music doesn’t mean devalued music for Techdirt. If you’ve read the original, it’s largely the same content, but cleaned up a little and much more concise. Free Doesn’t Mean Devalued: The concept of zero took ages for societies to recognize, let alone understand. Mike has explained before [...]
Credit: Brent and MariLynn [CC BY] Mike Masnick questions the word “balance” in the copyright debate: I’ve long thought that balance is the wrong way to look at it. The purpose of copyright law is to incentivize the creation of new content, and thus the standard on which copyright law should be judged is one [...]
Credit: David Weekly [CC BY] I’ve been meaning to comment on Mathew Ingram’s defence of newspapers and serendipity. Clay Shirky has been talking about the bundling that occurs in newspapers as a mere accident of print, something that was only necessary given the constraints of paper, but doesn’t make sense otherwise. Mathew disagrees: Is there [...]
Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth, wrote about why everyone should have premarital sex on Feministing yesterday. Let’s face it – if you’re going to commit yourself to someone for (presumably) the rest of your life, it’s probably best if you know that you’re sexually compatible. I don’t think this is particularly radical thing [...]
One of my closest friends, Pat Lee, has a webcomic, The Fantastical Adventures of Caspian the Sea-Devil. The “about” section contains this fantastic gem on art and originality: This comic, like all comics, consists of written and drawn elements. The written element, the story, will be somewhat guided by my hand as the author. Mostly [...]
Update: A more condensed version of this post was published on Techdirt. Mike Masnick does a great job of explaining why some libertarian and “free market” types freak out when they see a zero dollar price tag. The concept of zero took ages for societies to even recognize, nevermind understand. It’s not a number, but [...]
36
