Blogs

At 9:00 AM EST today, the parties to Jacobsen v. Katz filed a settlement agreement with the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. In doing so, they brought an end to one of the most important legal cases to date affecting the continued success of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The terms of the settlement mark a complete victory for Jacobsen.

I don’t usually post twice a day, but today was opening day in Barcelona of the Mobile World Congress, the biggest mobile show of the year, and the announcements were popping thick and fast.  One of those announcements unveiled a new mobile platform called MeeGo - a new open source contender in the race to power the broad array of devices that are rapidly proliferating in the mobile marketplace.  And, I’m happy to say, MeeGo will be hosted by The Linux Foundation.  We’ve been working for some time on this,  and we’re very pleased that the project has now gone pub

In which Frank exposes The Truth about venture capital, and the secret of the Perpetual Kitten.

Excerpt:

“Frank snorted with derision.  iBalls!  What a lame concept!  He thought he’d seen everything during the madness of the Internet bubble years – companies formed to sell dogfood over the Internet; year-old startups spending millions on 30 second Super Bowl ads; companies going public without a dollar in sales.  After the bust, he had assumed it would be decades before high tech saw that type of insanity again.

Our story so far:  Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre; to protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things.

As you may recall, the CodePlex Foundation indicated in January that it expected to name a permanent Executive Director within a few weeks’ time. That has now happened, and in the “small world” department, the new ED happens to be Paula Hunter - someone I’ve known for years, and worked with several times in the past. The full press release is below. Paula is someone I like and respect a lot, and a great choice for CodePlex.

…Sure enough, as Frank strode up the half-lit corridor in Cube City, there was Rick standing next to his cubicle, coffee cup in hand.  His face lit up as soon as he saw Frank.  “Morning, Frank,” he called out.  “Recovered from your big Saturday night yet?”  He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast and leaned casually against his cube so Frank could barely squeeze past. 

The last issue of Standards Today focused on XML - the underpinning of ODF and hundreds of other standards - and one of the most important standards ever developed.  Here is the editorial from that issue.

The second chapter in this online cybersecurity mystery novel

Frank wondered how long his phone had been buzzing.  He was about to turn it off when he saw that it was his daughter Marla calling.

“Hi Kid,” he said, “Listen…”

This is the first chapter in my new cybersecurity eBook in which you’ll meet Frank, our erstwhile hero, and get your first clue about the tangled train of events yet to unfold:

Those that know me know that I firmly believe that there is a Monty Python vignette, or at least a catchphrase, for every occasion. And on this occasion, that catchphrase is, “And now for something completely different!”

Betamax vs.VHS, HD DVD vs. Blu-ray and now DECE vs. Keychest. Can’t the consumer electronics industry and studios cut us a break?

Earlier this week, I noted the fact that the 100 day mark for the CodePlex Foundation had passed (on December 19) without any comment from the Foundation on how they had fared against their aggressive goals for that time period, including the replacement of the founding, interim Board of Directors, with a permanent board. 

As you may recall, Microsoft announced back on September 10 that it had launched a new foundation “as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects.” It called it’s new non-profit organization the CodePlex F

Yesterday a very small company won a very big victory against a very large software vendor. The small company is i4i, a Canadian company that claimed that the large company had not infringed its patent accidentally, but knowingly and willfully, after engaging in discussions relating to the very same technology in question.

If you’re like me, you became fully aware of free and open source software only gradually, rather than suddenly and all at once. In my case, the process was somewhat schizophrenic, because I was personally involved, through my clients, in some of the evolutionary steps of FOSS itself, and only realized in retrospect how they fit into the whole picture.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose
— French Proverb

According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Over the next ten years, tens, and possibly hundreds of millions, of new platforms are going to be put into place in the United States as part of a new national infrastructure; an equal number will be installed in Europe (many are already being installed). The same may happen in other parts of the world as well.

It’s been more than a month since I last wrote about the CodePlex Foundation, the new open source initiative announced by Microsoft in early September.

It’s easy to appreciate the wonders of the Web, and all of the riches that the Internet brings into our lives. All of which makes it easy indeed not to notice the things that tend to slip away, as the collateral damage of progress. Recently, we woke up to the fact that if we don’t care about document formats, our personal and public documents may disappear into a digital Black Hole of no return.

One of the realities that every standards professional must deal with is the sad fact that everyone else in the world thinks that standards are…

[start over; no one else thinks about standards much at all]

Ahem. One of the things that standards folks must come to terms with is the fact that on the rare occasions when anyone else thinks about standards at all, likely as not it’s to observe that standards are…

Some of the best software available is open source, but non-proprietary software has enemies as well as friends. Not surprisingly, then there’s been plenty of fog on Capitol Hill about free and open source software (FOSS) for a decade now.

Two weeks ago, I wrote an analysis of the governance structure of the CodePlex Foundation, a new open source-focused foundation launched by Microsoft. My opinion, as expressed in that piece, was that significant changes (which I outlined) would need to be made to the Foundation before it would be taken seriously by Microsoft’s competitors, and more especially, by individual open source developers.