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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 readers remain very skeptical about open source and/or the XO laptop, and I think that what the Sahana team has done exemplifies the concepts of…

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.

Andy Updegrove posts yet another insightful analysis on the evolution of standards in the modern technology. He reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided 3-to-2 that a licensing promise made in a standards development process trumps the private right to hold licensees for ransom when a 3rd party later acquires the patent.…

The Ardour project is an open source digital audio workstation. To many in the recording studio business, digital audio workstation is written DAW. Unwritten is widely held belief that recording studio platforms come in two varieties: proprietary native platforms like Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows, and DigiDesign’s HD system (which is a proprietary hardware add-on).…

I just read an excellent summary of the top 10 SE Linux stories of 2007, and it reminds me that I owe the world a blog posting about the amazing vision and accomplishments of the SE Linux project.

We’ve gotten a number of licenses submissions over the years, which attempt to be “succinter than thou”. I guess that people feel that even a license as simple as the BSD license is too complicated. Examples include the Fair License (which we approved), or the Æsthetic Permissive License (currently under consideration), or the Beer-Ware license…