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In 2003, Nicholas Carr shook up an increasingly irrelevant community of CIOs by publishing the article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. I believe that he got it half right: the irreversable trend of information technology was toward commodity economics, and thus the idea of paying rents for proprietary software was preposterous. What he did not quite get…

A few months ago I posted my initial impressions for a draft version of the GPLv3 license, and I am happy to say that as with other licenses developed with community input, the then-good GPLv3 has continued to improve. As I read the “final” draft version of GPLv3, which I think is truly excellent, I…

Alan MacCormack published a new paper entitled A Developer Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center. Whenever I see a statement of developer desiderata, I’m reminded of this timeless posting by One Laptop Per Child hacker extraordinaire Chris Blizzard:

The news outlets, radio waves, and blogosphere [1] and [2] continue to buzz with responses to the FORTUNE magazine article where Microsoft claims that many popular Open Source software packages, including the Linux kernel, infringe some 235 patents they own and control. Most of this buzz has shifted from questions about the integrity (and/or viability)…

Note: this is just my opinion. The OSI board may have a different opinion if it speaks as a body. Microsoft is spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with their latest anti-Linux patent campaign. If they had an actual, solid case of patent infringement, they would go to a judge, get an injunction against the…

Rik van Riel posted an interesting insight this weekend about this important difference between those working under the constraints of the proprietary software model and those of us who use and develop open source software: they *have* to target their development to work on marketable features, while we have more liberty to focus on things…