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Remember all those years ago, when people laughed at the first Android
phones (which were, to tell the truth, pretty clunky, but still...).
Remember how Apple fans have always insisted that however well Android
did in the smartphone market, it would always be second best, and never
seriously threaten Apple's dominance? Well here's what actually happened:
On Open Enterprise blog.
In my post yesterday about Cisco making the code for its H264 codec
available, I noted that the really important news was that Mozilla was
working on Daala, a fully open next generation codec. One of the key
people on the team doing that is Monty Montgomery, and he's written a
really interesting blog post
about the announcement and its background, which I recommend thoroughly
(the discussion in the comments is also very illuminating):
On
Open Enterprise blog.
You know that open source has won when everybody wants to wrap
themselves in a little bit of openness in order to enjoy the glow.
That's good news - provided it represents a move to true open source and
not fauxpen source. Which brings me to the following news:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Revelations about the staggering levels of online surveillance that
are now routine in this country have been met with a stunning silence
from the UK government. There's an important meeting
tomorrow where three MPs from the main parties are trying to get some
kind of debate going on this crucial issue. It would be helpful if you
could ask your MP to participate. Here's what I've written:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I first wrote about the importance of open clinical trials two years ago. More recently, I urged people to contact their MEPs for a crucial vote that was taking place in one of the committees
in the European Parliament. The AllTrials site, which is coordinating
the fight to obtain access to this vital public health information, now
asks for help during another stage in the battle for open data:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Software patents have figured quite frequently on this blog, usually
in terms of their deep problems, especially for free software. Although
I've tended to write about what's happening in Europe and the US, the
rest of the world is also beginning to experience the same issues as
computers enter ever-more deeply into daily life there, and is similarly
seeking to come up with solutions.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I explored at some length the curious reasons that Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave for supporting the proposal to add hooks for DRM into HTML5.
On Open Enterprise blog.
My last two posts about the Linux Foundation have been about how it
is broadening its scope to embrace open projects well beyond the Linux
kernel. For example, there was the OpenDaylight Project, and then the OpenBEL. Now we have this:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I noted in my last TTIP update,
things are beginning to get moving again on this front. One reflection
of the growing interesting in this important trade and investment
agreement was the public discussion
entitled "Internet, Trade and Democracy: Transatlantic Relations under
the Shadow of Surveillance", held in Berlin, and organised by Internet
& Society Collaboratory and the blogger project FutureChallenges.org
of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of week ago, I discussed the awful idea of adding DRM to the official HTML5 standard, and where that would lead us. More recently, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a piece about openness that included the following comment:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's been fairly quiet on the TAFTA/TTIP
front recently. That's largely because Europe shuts down for its summer
hols during August, and has only just got going again. Unfortunately
(for TAFTA/TTIP), the next round of negotiations has just been cancelled
because the US administration was busy being, er, not busy. But as a
consolation prize, we have a couple of documents from the European
Commission on the subject of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS),
which by a happy coincidence was the subject of my previous TTIP Update.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I noted a couple of years ago, one of the most important legacies
of the Hargreaves review of copyright in the digital age was its
insistence that policy must be based on evidence,
not dogma. There were some heartening signs that the UK government was
indeed following through on that, notably in terms of a series of reports
from Ofcom that explore in detail many aspects of the online use of
copyright materials - something that was simply unavailable before.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where
he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit.
That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation
of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to
the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first
place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating
its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what
Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up
with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
At the beginning of this year, I discussed a report
written for the European Parliament, which warned that the US legal
framework allowed the authorities there to spy on EU data held by any US
cloud computing service. I also noted as an interesting fact that the NSA was building a huge new data centre, and that encryption might not offer the protection we thought.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When the first Android smartphones came out, the consensus view among
certain "experts" was that Google didn't stand chance. The dogma was
that the iPhone was so perfect, and its hold on the market so strong,
that there was no way that Android could displace it. I think we can
say that hasn't proved to be the case:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week, I wrote an article pointing out that the NSA's
assault on cryptography, bad as it was, had a silver lining for open
source, which was less vulnerable to being subverted than closed-source
applications produced by companies. However, that raises the question:
what about the mobile world?
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the many valuable things that come out of the Linux Foundation
is an annual review of Linux kernel development. It's just released
the 2013 edition (freely available upon registration), and the news is resoundingly good. Here are the key points.
On
Open Enterprise blog.