Language is important. It shapes our view, our thinking. It’s necessary for our expression and understanding. It’s important to pay attention to the terms we choose. The commonly used phrase “intellectual property rights” is loaded and problematic. Intellectual property rights: Ambiguous; it lumps copyright, patent and trademark law all under […]
Free Software
98 posts
I’ve been setting up a few old ThinkPads (a 240 and an iSeries model from the same era) with Fluxbuntu to give them new life and replace the ever aging and useless Windows 98 they were running. I looked into Damn Small Linux and other such distributions optimized for minimal […]
Boycott? I’m down. The proprietary software company Trend Micro has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Barracuda Systems. They claim that Barracuda is violating their patent by distributing the free software antivirus program ClamAV. Pamela Jones of Groklaw writes: I think it’s another attempt to attack the FOSS development model […]
Steve Ballmer was asked by a student if Microsoft would ever create an open-source version of Windows in the future. He responds, I guess in an attempt at humour, with this: We wouldn’t be hosting Minority Student Day if we open-source Windows because we wouldn’t have enough profit to pay […]
Kevin Kelly outlined eight “generatives” in his article, Better Than Free, defined as qualities or attributes which must be “generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured… not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced.” These are qualities or attributes that remain scarce and valuable while digital goods become abundant and available at […]
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Kevin Kelly’s recent post is a great summary of the ideas behind economic models […]
Can you say artificial scarcity? Also, Hotmail’s “customer service” seems to be a poorly implemented bot. But did you really need another reason not to use Hotmail?
Mike Ho from Techdirt provides his take on the “glorious future” of video players, sentiments with which I can strongly empathize: With each new offering, it seems like viewers need a separate and proprietary piece of video playing software which is obviously aimed at enhancing the viewing experience for the […]
The Standards Blog lists several articles covering this story, but here’s the basic summary. The service pack was released for Microsoft Office 2003 to make it easily to interoperate with Windows Vista and to read Microsoft’s new (troubled and broken) OOXML format that is the default in Office 2007. The […]