Mindquarry Dies - and Lives!

Mindquarry, which

provides a powerful set of collaborative tools for use online and offline to streamline teamwork between information workers in small to large enterprises.

has just announced that it

will stop providing commercial services and products.

That's regrettable, obviously. But there's some good news too:

The Mindquarry GO and Mindquarry PRO products will be discontinued as of today. Our Open Source product will remain publicly available (see below for more information). To those with a Mindquarry GO Beta account, we now offer the possibility to migrate their data to the Open Source version of Mindquarry. This means that they can install Mindquarry themselves and use existing data from their Mindquarry GO Beta instance. Please write to support@mindquarry.com if you want us to extract your data from Mindquarry GO Beta to send it to you.
Keeping our Open Source software alive

Our developers team is currently working on finishing the Mindquarry 1.2beta release, which will be available around end of October. Beginning with 1.2beta, Mindquarry source code will be hosted on Sourceforge as well as the mindquarry.com Web site. Hence, our software as well as all necessary information such as installation documentation and forum discussions will still be available. Further details and links will be available in the next and probably final Mindquarry community newsletter.

This is an object lesson in one of free software's great virtues: whatever happens, the code lives on. This means that even commercial customers can migrate to free versions where they have been paying for other varieties. (Via NetworkWorld.)

Larry's New Code

As the author of two books with the word "code" in the title, I naturally gravitate to other tomes that also draw on this word. But Larry Lessig's Code is rather special: it's one of the definitive texts of the Net age. I remember reading version 1.0, when it came out; and now, following a suitably wikified genesis, here's Codev2. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Now is Our Summer of Code Made Glorious Winter

After the Summer of Code, now the Winter of Code:

The South Korean government and local tech companies have started an open source student developer contest, similar to Google's Summer of Code.

Dubbed Winter of Code, the competition will begin during Korea's winter recess in January next year. Organized by Korean games publisher NCsoft, local IT firms and the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency, the contest aims to nurture new developers and promote open source software development in the country.

Code is Law, Code is Power

Yup:

Ministers were today urged to consider abandoning the multi-billion pound Joint Strike Fighter project unless the United States agrees within weeks to share sensitive technology.

...

Ministers have previously threatened that the UK could pull out of plans to buy up to 150 of the military planes for the RAF and Navy unless America agreed to transfer secrets about its software that Britain argues are needed in order to operate and maintain them independently.