This is the text of a comment I made on a blog posting by Matt Asay: Matt, Thanks for saying what I would have said. I’ll go a few steps…

OOXML needs to die. It’s clear that OOXML is a faux standard — not because it’s a vendor standard. There are lots of vendor-created standards which are real standards (e.g. PostScript). No, OOXML is a botch because it’s expressed in terms of an undocumented Microsoft graphics library. OOXML is all “and then a miracle occurs”. You’ve seen that cartoon, right?

Steve Ballmer asks, in an E*Week interview, who speaks for the Open Source Community, and answers his question by saying that nobody does. True enough! He then goes on to point out that Larry Ellison, he speaks for Oracle, yes. True enough! But who speaks for the proprietary software vendors? When we, the open source community, want to make an agreement with the proprietary software vendors, who do we talk to? Do we talk to Larry? Or Steve? Or Jonathan? Or Curley? Or Moe?

Simon, I’m beginning to think that you were right and I was wrong. You said a standard’s process is a crucial aspect of the standard’s product, and a process that…

The OSI adopted a mandate of working on Open Standards two years ago. We put forward a statement on requirements for an Open Standard which boiled down to a simple…

One of the high points of my last trip to California was meeting James Burgett. Burgett is an utterly fearless man, a former drug addict who candidly admits he originally began recycling and assembling computers to finance his habit but then got clean and founded one of the most effective and remarkable nonprofits I know of.

On November 2nd, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a business agreement that, without adding any prejudice of my own, was characterized as worse than useless by Bradly Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center.

I’ve been invited to speak at the Irish Web Technology Conference 2008, in Dublin a week from today, on the subject of Open Source Licensing. If you assume that this…

Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free blog posting has some useful insights for people trying to profit from their Open Source development. He speaks of “Generatives”, which are attributes of something…

On January 31st 2008, Mary Jo Foley posted an insightful blog about Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy. On the morning of February 1st 2008, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6B hostile for Yahoo!, and by the end of the day, Microsoft had lost $20B in market capitalization. Where does this leave Microsoft’s open source strategy and the analysis thereof?

I just wrote a blog posting at my other blog, ( parent . thesis ), about a new application for the XO laptop: the Sahana disaster management system. Many CNET…

I’m starting to think that the dynamics of Open Source production are such that user licenses are crap. Yes, I’m saying that everything that we’ve put into licenses, all the thought, all the drama, all the durm-und-strang, is wasted. You might wonder why.