open...

Regular readers of this blog will know that the commons has been a major theme here for some years, since it offers an extremely fruitful wa...

I've been a long-time fan of the 3D modelling program Blender . No surprise, then, that I've also been delighted to see the Blender...

Yesterday, Computerworld UK carried an interesting report headed “British Library explores research technologies of the future”. Here's ...

One of the great strengths of open source is that it offers users choice. You don't like one solution? Choose another. You don't lik...

Because anyone can take Linux and use it as they wish without needing to ask permission (provided they comply with the licence), it ends up ...

You may have noticed there's a fair bit of interest in this cloud computing thing. You've probably also come across various articles...

Jamie Love has been one of the key people writing about and fighting the worst aspects of ACTA. He's just posed a good question on Twi...

The issue of Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing has cropped up quite a few times in these pages. The last time I wrot...

Of course you do - and here's your big chance. Dirk Riehle is not only the Professor for Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander...

You may recall the global excitement a year ago, when Gmail finally came out of beta - after an astonishing five years: On Open Enterprise b...

On the 13 April 1999, a press release appeared headed “Mindcraft study shows Windows NT server outperforms Linux.” The summary read: “Micros...

I'm very sceptical about the concept of “cyber attacks”. Not that I doubt that computer systems and infrastructure are attacked: it'...

I see that my old mates the Business Software Alliance are a tad concerned that the European Commission might do something sensible with the...

Most people have heard about the 18th-century inventor James Watt and his steam engine; not so many know about the way he used patents to st...

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences last week at the Open World Forum. As I noted, the two-day event closed with the presentation of the...

I've been writing about all kinds of openness and sharing on this blog nearly five years now. Before that, I had been covering free sof...

A Microsoft researcher offers an interesting medical metaphor : Just as when an individual who is not vaccinated puts others’ health at risk...

Last week I went along to the Open World Forum in Paris. By that, I don't mean to imply I just bowled along there on the off-chance it m...

The careers of few people have been so intertwined with the history of open source as that of Larry Augustin. He was even present when the t...

Last week I wrote a piece entitled “Are We Entering the Golden Age of Forks?” I concluded: I predict we are going to see plenty more forks i...

Last week I went along to the grandly-named Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar on Open source software: in business, in government. The good...

I regard Matt Asay as one of the most perceptive commentators on the world of free software and related areas. So I was rather disappointed...

In July 1998, the Frenchman Gaël Duval released his new GNU/Linux distribution called Mandrake-Linux. It was a fork of Red Hat using the KDE...

Remember IdeaStorm – “Where Your Ideas Reign” – Dell's brave venture into the scary world of crowdsourcing? Amazingly, it's still go...

One of the biggest disgraces in this country is the way that computing is taught - or rather, the way it is not taught. I know as a parent f...