This is a very good article in the New York Times about publicising inventions via Web 2.0 tools like YouTube. The piece concentrates on Dr Johnny Chung Lee, a 28-year-old inventor who became a YouTube celebrity by posting Wii hacks, including how to make a muilti-touch whiteboard, and the mind-boggling Read more…
As many other academics, I have come to rely on reference software to keep my bibliographic resources organised. For some time I have been using Endnote because it came installed with University computers, but I have been increasingly frustrated with its lack of interoperability and inflexible interface. EndNote has many Read more…
Some time ago I had talked about the case of Jacobson v Katzer, a very interesting ruling from the United States that in my view had made the argument that open source licences are contracts, and therefore breach of licence should be pursued as breach of contract. As I wrote Read more…
It is now official. The much publicised Download Day has set a new Guinness World Record for the single-most downloaded file in a single day with 8,002,530 unique and complete downloads during the day, an impressive figure whichever way you look at it. Firefox 3 has now been downloaded more Read more…
(via Guardian Blogs) It seems just like yesterday that Darl McBride wrote his infamous letter to Congress, where he came narrowly close of calling open source as tantamount to anti-Americanism, communism and abolition of intellectual property rights. Bill Gates famously called open source a modern form of communism. What do Read more…
There is a lot of excitement about the new Firefox. I’ve just downloaded it for both Mac and Windows, and I have to say that this is the best browser I have ever tried. The first thing I’ve noticed is that it is fast, in some instances pages that took Read more…
Slashdot has posted a link to this blog post discussing why Linux has not taken over the operating system environment. It is free after all, so why aren’t there more people using it? The blogger poses the fact that people do not like things that are free, and that is Read more…
On Friday 25 January I attended an expert meeting discussing the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). This is the latest member of the growing open source licence ecology, and if I must say so, it is quite a nicely drafted document (biased opinion warning, as I helped in checking the Read more…
Habitual readers may have noticed that one of the repetitive memes in this blog is that copyleft licences are contracts. In Jacobsen v Katzer, and American court has agreed. The case involved Robert Jacobsen, an open source developer participating in an open source project called Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI), Read more…
(via Groklaw and Nicolas Jondet) Those not familiar with the SCO v IBM case, you can find some basic information here. Last week Groklaw reported on a ruling that single-handedly dismantled SCO’s copyrights claims. SCO based their suit almost entirely on the assumption that they owned rights over UNIX code, Read more…