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 […]
Monthly archives: November 2009
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Credit: rachel the cat [CC BY-SA] Jeff Jarvis recently voiced some concerns about the temporary web: Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams – and I believe at least part of it will be – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]