tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1595660 2009-11-28T03:14:51-08:00 The FSF freed Software. What about the people who wrote it? TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e550a4225988340120a6e508a0970b 2009-11-28T03:14:51-08:00 2009-11-28T03:14:51-08:00

Writing this blog I came to this conclusion that technology watch would be made much easier with specialized tools. Since I wasn't satisfied with the various RSS readers or start pages I tried, I decided to write my own. You can now download Red Panda and try it for yourself. There is also a French version. And yes, at some point down the line it will be made open source :) If search engines are so smart, why do they need an input field?

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51578372 2008-06-19T10:55:10-07:00 2008-06-19T10:55:10-07:00

In case some of you are wondering, MTG is going on a camping trip with his 6 y.o. (coolest kid on the block). We will be back early July w/ such subjects as companies buying open source, stealth crowd sourcing and the presentation of a serious Ubuntu competitor ... Cheers, MTG

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51378920 2008-06-16T16:50:57-07:00 2008-06-16T16:50:57-07:00

Did you smile in reading this title? Maybe you did just like I did when I read Linus' post launching Linux for the first time: Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Hackers' culture is fun, right? No big deal either if French Linux Magazine has a tradition of offering a "Calendrier Debian" (a Debian calendar, commented here in Fr) to its readers at the end of the year. And yes there is a naked woman on it albeit not a full Playboy-style double page. And yes, if it's not a biggie, then why fussing about it? Imagine that you're a little person and a hacker. Imagine further that you've just released a great piece. Your server is stressed by the success, you're happy. Then a guy who noticed that 3 years ago you mentioned your size in...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51351596 2008-06-14T19:10:48-07:00 2008-06-14T19:10:48-07:00

The rumor has it that Carlos Ghosn, the French-Lebanese business genius who turned Nissan-Renault into the 3rd or 4th worldwide automaker, made a point of using properly chopsticks shortly after he became CEO of NISSAN, so that to gain respect from his co-workers. Little things do matter. In the open source world, many grandiloquent declarations of free and open source commitment have been legitimately questioned by apparently minor details: Microsoft refusing the GNU GPLv3 on their open source repository CodePlex or Google refusing the GNU AGPLv3 (Affero) on open source repository Google Code are good examples of such troubling discrepancies. Short of a slow start and a few hiccups, SUN has done pretty well so far. The company seems genuinely committed to open source and free software. Here is a story that shows that SUN commitment runs even deeper. Rhino is a widely used (I suspect its transmission is somewhat...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51220384 2008-06-12T01:42:47-07:00 2008-06-12T01:42:47-07:00

A recent article from Edmund J. Walsh in Law.com has generated a few negative echoes in the FOSS community. The article is not very interesting as such since it provides with many allegations, almost no facts and only 3 links: a law firm, the author's bio and a link to the Software Freedom Law Center. What's more interesting is the way Mr. Walsh spread his FUD arguments. Basically the entire document is built so that the reader forgets about 2 things: Fair comparison: Every time an open source license obligation is analyzed, it should be compared to the similar or the more stringent obligations of a standard commercial license for an equivalent product/code. Risk analysis: The number of lawsuits involving proprietary licenses is much larger than the number of lawsuits involving open source licenses, even when the number of lines of code is factored in. So from a pure statistical...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51173894 2008-06-10T21:29:11-07:00 2008-06-10T21:29:11-07:00

So apparently the Boy Scouts of America are all Gun Ho about open source. Computer World explains us that they have launch their BSA Open Source Initiative. Worth mentioning is that this initiative has nothing to do with the Business Software Alliance nor is it affiliated in any way with the Open Source Initiative. Open Source celebrities and former Boy Scout and OSI (the other one) co-founder Eric S. Raymond is quoted to be "delighted to see this happening". He adds: The scout goals of education, community service and fostering individual self-reliance are perfectly in tune with open-source community values. Cool. I only wish I had Mr. Raymond as a troop leader when I was a 14 y.o. boy scout. At that time, learning about defensive programming would have seemed even more thrilling than exchanging at night a few tidbits about self-contentment. When a woman has had several orgasms on...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51071890 2008-06-09T02:02:28-07:00 2008-06-09T02:02:28-07:00

Courtesy of groklaw a great research paper (pdf) from the University of Washington dissecting under which assumptions DMCA copyrights infringement takedown notices are in fact generated for BitTorrent users(1). The conclusions of the paper are most troubling and show that a number of current enforcement practices lead to poor, inconclusive identifications. Note that this research doesn't even take into account the obvious cases where a computer has been cracked in any way (e.g. trojan). This is the IP identification process itself which is shown to be highly unreliable in most cases. Innocent users can be targeted by a notice even when they are not using any P2P software and without being framed Our results show that potentially any Internet user is at risk for receiving DMCA takedown notices today. Whether a false positive sent to a user that has never even used BitTorrent or a truly infringing user that relies...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-51040606 2008-06-08T11:55:18-07:00 2008-06-08T11:55:18-07:00

Tired of letting companies or so-called well-informed blogs telling you what's the best open source project around? Well, in the same spirit than that of Equitable Open Source but this time for qualifying the projects themselves, Source Forge is offering you to vote. Here is the SourceForget.Net 2008 Community choice award! Don't pass on an opportunity to make your opinion count!

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-50939258 2008-06-06T18:59:42-07:00 2008-06-06T18:59:42-07:00

Before to comment in details the latest production of Mr. Matusow, I'd like the reader to pay attention to the following: in his post, Mr. Matusow's mentions: Collaborative Development: 9 times OSS: 8 times Free (as in Free software): only once So could you ask, what is this collaborative development, this new syntagm Mr. Matusow is using all over the place? Well, buried deep towards the very end of his post, Mr. Matusow gives us a definition of sort: I was deeply involved with a series of projects that demonstrated a wide range of possible approaches to collaborative development (using non-OSS, OSS, and Free Software licensing models; using various approaches to tools, project types, funding models, etc.). That's extremely interesting: throughout the post, collaborative development is used so that to be confused with OSS: both terms are employed almost as frequently and in a context where they can easily be...

jm tag:typepad.com,2003:post-50793338 2008-06-03T21:10:10-07:00 2008-06-03T21:10:10-07:00

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest to the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw. Here is a list of other extremely interesting (mostly US-born) organizations and/or projects. PS: Except for Linux and GNU I didn't mention FOSS-project centric organizations. Electronic Frontier Foundation ( wikipedia description ) EFF is regularly involved in defending organizations like Wikipedia (some are suing Wikipedia because they don't approve of content) or even Google (some are suing Google because AdSense uses certain keywords) From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the...

jm