open...

So, the long-awaited US Supreme Court ruling on Bilski vs. Kappos has appeared – and it's a mess. Where many hoped fervently for some cl...

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As o...

There's a nice piece of work by Charles Arthur in The Guardian today that puts a fascinating post from one of Microsoft's top PR peo...

Interesting : The Open University (OU) is now a certified Microsoft IT Academy adding to its fast-growing suite of IT vendor certifications....

I'll admit it: watching the debates about net neutrality in the US, I've always felt rather smug. Not for us sensible UK chappies, I...

This was a pleasant surprise, a *summary* judgment against Viacom in favour of Google: Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgm...

There is certainly no lack of debate about copyright, and whether it promotes or hinders creativity. But in one important respect, that deb...

One of the most fascinating strands in the free software story has been Microsoft's interactions with it. To begin with, the company sim...

I can't believe this. A few days ago I wrote about the extraordinary extra monopolies the German newspaper industry wanted - including ...

There's a new book out about the rise and use of a globalised English, dubbed " Globish ": Globish is a privatised lingua fran...

One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen b...

"UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim", so proclaimed an article in The Times earlier this year. It began [. pdf ]:...

Since one of the key ideas behind this blog is to explore the application of the open source approach to other fields, I was naturally rathe...

I met Matt Ridley once, when he was at The Economist , and I wrote a piece for him (I didn't repeat the experience because their fees at...

Here's an almost unbelievable piece about what's happening in Germany right now: It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying...

Let's be frank: standards are pretty dull; but they are also important as technological gatekeepers. As the shameful OOXML saga showed,...

Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into f...

This week is one of the magic " plenary " ones in the European Parliament: Only during the plenary weeks of June 14-17 and July 5...

Earlier this week I wrote about a useful study of the economics of copyright, pointing out that we need more such analyses in order to adopt...

Readers with good memories may recall a little kerfuffle over an Ofcom consultation to slap DRM on the BBC's HD service: if this scheme ...

Recently, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Cameron Neylon , probably the leading - and certainly most articulate - exponent of open sci...

One of the problems with the debate around copyright is that it is often fuelled more by feelings than facts. What is sorely lacking is a ha...

Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the fla...

Last week, I met up with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO. He gave a very fluent presentation to a group of journalists that ran through Re...

Although I have never owned an iPhone, nor even desired one, I do recognise that it has redefined the world of smartphones. In that sense, ...