Google Decides Smartphone Market Share Is More Important Than Net Neutrality

As a recent post noted, net neutrality is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years, this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if Orange is now getting paid to carry Google's traffic, why shouldn't every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering Google's services? 

On Techdirt.

A Peach of an Apricot

I wrote previously about the open source film "Elephants Dream", produced the Blender Foundation. Recently it's been working on Peach:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a small team of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

But this time, it's going even further:

After Orange and Peach Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game!Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach.

Once again, Blender will lie at the heart of the project, and the intention is to do much more than produce an open game:

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

The last point is important: what open source needs is not a good game, nice as that would be, but a framework for producing hundreds of them. It's great to see Blender and the open source 3D engine Crystal Space stepping up to that challenge.

How Orange Can Become the Apple of Our Eye

Orange has repackaged some of its services for telecommuting workers into a portfolio called "Open Office."

And yet it doesn't think this might be confused with a certain office suite of a similar name:

A spokesman for Orange UK said that the telecommunications company's use of the name "Open Office" should not create any confusion because it did not refer to a software package, and the term was not yet a registered trademark in the U.K.

Well, maybe not, but how about this: as a gesture of goodwill, why doesn't Orange start offering links to (the other) OpenOffice.org on its site? It will cost it nothing, avoid confusion, and earn it plenty of brownie points with the free software world. Heck, it could even hook up its Open Office with users' PCs running copies of OpenOffice.org. What's not to like?

Going on a Blender

Blender has always been one of my favourite open source projects, not least for the inspirational way money was raised by the common folk to make proprietary code open. Similarly, the open film "Elephant's Dream" was a good example of innovative thinking.

Now they're at it again:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.

...

As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.

This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.

All important stuff, because it's taking open source into new areas.