Matt Asay On IBM Patents
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Patent System on April 8, 2010
Wow. I don’t often agree with the Canonical COO, Matt Asay, on many things and even when I do in general, I often find myself in disagreement with details. In Mr. Asay’s recent piece “IBM patent claims show open source has arrived“, that’s not a problem – because I disagree with everything, filled as it is with inaccuracies [...]
Firefox in Ubuntu to be powered by Google after all
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 8, 2010
Old News Ubuntu was going to rely on Microsoft as the default search engine for 10.04. Let’s review the rationale: Why? I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and [...]
Review: KeePassX
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Reviews on April 7, 2010
Keeping track of passwords sucks. We may be moving – ever so slowly – towards some sort of acceptable centralized identity authentication scheme, but in the here and now I bet you have to manage a lot of passwords. I know I do, and I hate it. Every site has some slightly different set of rules for [...]
Emacs and the GPL
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 6, 2010
The H has quite the interesting story up, “Emacs & the birth of the GPL“, tracing how Emacs developed, and how that in turn led to the development of the GPL. Seeing the Future I quite enjoyed seeing how RMS tempered prophetic statements with unfortunate real-world experience. Consider this insight from RMS into why it would [...]
Just Another Zealot
Posted by Jason in Patent System, Propriatery Technology on April 5, 2010
From the Prospect Magazine article “Mash the State“: Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one [...]
Site News: Testing IntenseDebate
I’m testing IntenseDebate for the comments. Rationale The main reason is I would like to offer a couple of features to commentors here that I appreciate at other sites: Alternative authentication opens (primarily OpenID) Email notification of responses/comments There are lots of other features to IntenseDebate – like voting on comments – but I don’t [...]
Songbird drops Linux support
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 3, 2010
Sad news: Songbird will no longer support Linux. I gave Songbird two tries, and saw improvement and thought it had potential. It never reached a point where it could challenge Rhythmbox, but I was interested in where it was going. I did think if it reached it goals it would be a serious contender. Now [...]
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