BlackBerry patent case is currently a hot topic. It shows how a company without a product, using only patents, can try to bring a successful service down.
When the new year starts, people try to summarize the last year (or even longer periods of time) and draw conclusions. It also happened to me, but not because the new year, but events from last month or so.
Popular forums get sold from time to time, when the orginal founder doesn't want (or doesn't have time) to keep it. The sad thing is that the outcome is good in only rare cases. It happened to something that's now called JustLinux. It also happened to QtForum, a forum about the Qt library. In short, the site became unusable. In this case, the former admins have created a new site, QtCentre. Best wishes to them.
Business Week writes about five things they think are most important when thinking about Open Source in business in 2005. I'd add OpenOffice.org (especially after version 2 released), which is becoming more and more popular.
Wikipedia has just changed its policy on creating new entries. Now you need to be a member (but you can still edit when beeing anonymous). The change one made after an issue with an unchecked article that made it to USA Today (not sure what's the point in that, through).
The move made won't help much and everyone knows that. Wikipedia is just an unauthoritative source and when using data from it, you should check it. That's how I do...
Iain Ferguson writes at ZDNet:
Ideologues have to fade into the background and keep their philosophical debates within the the community.
The author clearly states that he wants the Linux and FLOSS community to finish all idealogical debates and just do business. The thing is that it's hard to find the borders of the community and, more important, no way to control it. It's not a company where the management can agree on the way to go. No. It's community, with hundreds of people with their own ideas.
There are people who use Linux and FLOSS to make money. Nothing wrong with that. There are also people who deal with it for different reasons and like the debates, in fact. I don't want them to go and I don't think I'll see that in the near future. That's good.
Imagine that WWW was not invented 15 years ago, but yesterday. What would be different? James Boyle tries to answer this question in Financial Times. Refreshing, even if you don't agree with him.
LinuxQuestions.org has now more than 200000 registred members. 2 milion posts is also close.
There are awards given to initiatives etc violating privacy, called Big Brother Awards. New edition is comming shortly. Look at the list of nominees from different countries (unfortunately, not all translated to English). Many are just funny but if you realize that there are people who really want to implement such things and are taking it seriously, it looks different. Scary.
Groklaw writes about the High Court of Australia about modchips removing regional codes from Sony PS2 consoles and in this way, allowing games coded for a different region. The court decided that modchip is doesn't break copyright protection. It means it's legal.
There's an interesting story about one astronomer using another's logs. Both discovered the same object, but the one who just got the logs from the web was first to announce it.
I'm wondering why there wasn't a mail asking for permission to use the logs. Also, I don't know if the log author was credited correctly. If I find something on a web, however, I assume it was intentionaly placed to public.
It's hard to believe for someone who knows both apps that KOffice and OpenOffice use the same code. It looks, however, that it's possible. Interesting, especially when I think about the incompatibilities the two had for years.
There's an interview with RMS. There are many things discussed. RMS explains certain ideas from GPL3 (many things are still undecided) and talks about compatibility issues (GPL3 patch into GPL2 code). What's more? A number of questions about GPL popularity, licensing terms, software patents and so called Trusted Computing. Interesting read, but don't expect new things.
There's a story about new GPL version, dirst draft by December. The article says it will be agains DRM and software patents. I'm wondering how it will be done. Nw GPL mey be controversial, but probably an interesting read.
Foreign Policy has a short article about public domain. It's not about public domain as it is known in the software world, rather about possibilites to share ideas. In fact, there's not much info in it for a technical person. It's a text for someone who doesn't know anything about the internals.
Cofee is, if not good, at least not bad as research shows. Good news :)