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 […]
Free Software
95 posts
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 […]
While I was very pleased with the proposal the Songwriters’ Association of Canada recently put forth to legalize file sharing in Canada, I couldn’t help but slam my head against the table when reading the “what some music creators have to say” link. With the exception of the a few […]
I read a post by Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) on software registration keys today that reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about this. Software is digital through and through, and yet there’s one unavoidable aspect of software installation that remains thoroughly analog: entering the registration key. Doesn’t that […]
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released software which it urged some of America’s largest universities to employ in order to monitor their networks for unauthorized file sharing. Not only do the universities not owe the MPAA anything, but the toolkit was found by security specialists to raise […]