open...

The recent battle over the Digital Economy Bill has focussed renewed attention on the area of copying digital artefacts – music and films, f...

The ECM company Alfresco ought to occupy a special place in the open source pantheon for readers of this blog. As well as being one of the l...

I've written a number of times about the curious experiment South Korea has been conducting: making its entire governmental and financi...

When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles (“clueless” was how ...

I am not an unthinking fan of everything Clay Shirky says, but I do find much of the stuff he writes thought provoking. In particular, I fo...

Public sector procurement is becoming a real battleground for open source in Europe. There have been few successes, but lots of groundwork h...

Free software began as a political movement: its central aim was – and remains – the propagation of freedom. Later, it became a development...

A little while ago I wrote about the worrying signs that the imminent Digital Economy Agenda, currently being drawn up by Neelie Kroes, was ...

Transparency is a close cousin of openness, and it's becoming increasingly, er, clear that we need the former in order to obtain the lat...

Rather remarkably, a draft version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released [.pdf] by the European Union, one of ...

I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because i...

One of the inspirations for free software was the scientific method. So it's deeply ironic that science finds itself increasingly unab...

Last week I wrote about a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) that examined the reliability of recorded music industry...

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I write a lot about software patents. The reason is simple: they represent probably the g...

One of the miracles of free software is that it always begins with one or two people saying: “hey, how hard can it be?” The miracle is that ...

One of the many frustrating aspects of the recent debate on the Digital Economy Bill was the constant repetition of two major inaccuracies. ...

Open source software is everywhere these days. In particular, Linux is being used increasingly to power embedded systems of all kinds. That...

There has been some criticism that Spotify doesn't really bring in much money for the artists concerned (the labels, of course, do fine...

So, the forces of stupidity, arrogance, greed, laziness and downright bloody-mindedness prevailed, and the Digital Economy Bill has turned f...

Alongside the UK's Tom Watson , New Zealand's Clare Curran is shaping up as one of the leading net-savvy politicians in the world. ...

It seems my MP was not at the Second Reading of the Digital Economy Bill. Here's what I've just fired off: Following my long conve...

Here is another of Kevin Kelly's brilliant posts, but this time it's not about deep philosophical issues, but something really munda...

Now is probably our last chance to influence our MPs on the Digital Economy Bill. Here's what I've sent : Although the main news to...

One area that I have been covering increasingly is that of open government. The parallels with the other opens are not immediate, but there...

The importance of Mozilla and its Firefox browser went up a notch last week. For it was then that it became clear that Microsoft has little ...