open...

The Apple iPad is a huge hit: 7.33 million of them were sold in the quarter ending in December. That's a pretty amazing achievement. But...

Over on the RedMonk blog, there's an entertaining post by James Governor on the subject of forks, prompted by the imminent arrival of a ...

The opposition between openness and so-called "rights" - which are typically state-granted monopolies like copyright and patents -...

On Monday, I called the HMRC to give them some information they wanted from me. After being placed on hold for about 10 minutes, I finally g...

Free software was inspired in part by the scientific method, but it is only now that science is starting to apply free software's key in...

The concept of the commons derives from common land. This still lives on in England, in the form of commons - like Clapham Common - and as ...

The Economist has been writing poorly-informed articles about open source for years - I dissected a particularly egregious example back in 2...

I wrote about the open source OpenStack back in October, based largely on wandering around the main OpenStack site. But there's no subst...

One of the reasons that I regard the rise of WikiLeaks as such a key event is that it is throwing an interesting light on so many areas – ma...

A few months ago, I spent quite a few words disembowelling a BSA report on piracy that made some highly-simplistic assumptions and calculati...

As my occasional postings on the subject indicate, one area that fascinates me is that of fabbers , aka 3D printers . One reason is that th...

I've been following the move to open data by the UK government for some time on this blog. Major milestones include the creation of the ...

Open access is about making copies of publicly-funded research available freely online. This stems from the belief that (a) having paid for...

The more powerful that Google becomes, and the more it needs to satisfy investors' desires for a good return on their money, the more it...

Dimdim is a Web-based collaboration platform that I signed up for ages ago, but never quite got around to using. Looks like I may have misse...

I asked Glyn’s help to answer many questions that came to my mind in the latest few months that shown how tough the fight to keep the Intern...

Almost without meaning to, I conducted a small experiment today. Over on Twitter, Brenda Wallace asked me a very good question: do you know...

I'm sure most people remember DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation - that later rebranded itself as the singularly unmemorable “Digital” ...

Readers will doubtless be relieved to learn that I do not intend writing one of those tiresome “top ten predictions for open source in 2011”...

Everyone knows that there are lies, damned lies and Web analytics, but the latter can at least give a feel for what's going on. And the ...

This looks huge: Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Сог...

Something entitled “Report on the International Status of Open Source Software 2010” sounds pretty dry, as does its summary: The objective o...

Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an ...

Back in September, Mozilla made an announcement: This week Mozilla joined Open Invention Network as a licensee. OIN is an organization which...

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, thin...