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At first sight, this extraordinary legal action against most of the digital world's leading lights might seem one of a kind: Interval Li...

A little while ago, I noted that Ofcom was seeking input on the subject of Net neutrality. I also promised to post my own submission, which ...

This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Andro...

The global environmental catastrophe that we all face is, of course, a typical tragedy of the (analogue) commons. Resources that are held i...

In the early days of free software, the struggle was just to get companies to try this new and rather unconventional approach, without worry...

Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure...

The first time I was really impressed by Microsoft was back in the 1980s. I was being given a private demonstration of a hot new program for...

Net neutrality is turning from a boring, irrelevant issue that few people thought about much into one of the key issues for today's Inte...

Videos are proving to be a key element in ensuring that policing is fair and honest, as recent events in the UK have demonstrated. But ther...

One of the interesting trends over the last few months has been the increasing activity in the field of open data. In the UK, this has been ...

Understandably, commentators are getting excited over the fact that according to one survey Internet Explorer has gained browser market sha...

As regular readers will know, I regard the concept of the commons as an increasingly important one, not least because it pulls together thre...

As a former publisher (no, really) I am fascinated by, and sympathetic to, efforts to come up with new models for profitable publishing in t...

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, wh...

The content management company Day Software may not be the world's most famous outfit making money from open source – perhaps a functio...

Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spre...

Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new...

As its name suggests, a commons is an outgrowth of things held in common, like common land. This has been extended to the digital sphere wi...

It began, perhaps, with SCO's insane attempt to obtain money from IBM and others for alleged infringements of its code. It proceeded w...

As regular readers of this blog will know, free software has an importance that extends way beyond the world of software. But for most peopl...

In 2007 the British Library (BL) and the JISC funded The Google Generation Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future research (C...

Once more there is a lot of heated discussion about what constitutes a “real” open source business model – that is, one that remains true to...

It's an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop – just like last year, and the year before that. But no...

I recently wrote about the latest iteration of the Open Source Hardware Definition, which provides a framework for crafting open hardware li...

One of the many things I love about Wikipedia is the underlying vision, as articulated by Jimmy Wales: Imagine a world in which every singl...