Tag: opensource

Does Yahoo signal critical commercial mass for open source?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

 Tim O’Reilly thinks that Yahoo has made a major announcement for open source:

 

‘One of the most important announcements at Oscon last week was Yahoo!’s commitment to support Hadoop. We’ve been writing about Hadoop on radar for a while, so it’s probably not news to you that we think Hadoop is important.[…]Let me unpack the two parts of this news: hadoop as an important open source project, and Yahoo!’s involvement. On the first front, I’ve been arguing for some time that free and open source developers need to pay more attention to Web 2.0.[…]OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor.’

 

Read the whole article here. 

Wordcamp live music apparently not licensed under GPL

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

It seems that WordCamp 2007, an open source software gathering, is no refuge from intellectual property thuggery. Watch this movie as Andy Skelton fairly exudes greed as he lunges to claim and monetize other people’s recordings after what was billed on the schedule as a mere “musical interlude.” Actually, I would have included the actual song in the movie too without a second thought–but it sucked.

The behavior on display is strangely grandiose in this case (e.g. the joke about whether it’s a “trillion-dollar song” or the belief that people want to feature bad acoustic frat music on their blog), but I’m afraid that it nonetheless could have a real chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas and information about such events.

The key quote from Andy Skelton from the movie:

“I just want a piece of..of your pie!”

To which I say–never!

WordCamp 2007 – day 2 – Dave Winer

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Dave Winer gave a very astute overview of some interesting questions facing WordPress and the overall open source community.  Here are my notes from the session:

Dave Winer: “A blog is one person’s voice.”

“Some people say, if it doesn’t have comments it’s not a blog.  That’s not true.”
2 forms of blogging
–rss title link description metadata(categories) – each blog post is an essay unto itself
–linkblogging/human aggregation(??)/microblogging (not different from linkblogging??)

“I wanted to fit in with the Netvibes/Pageflakes..” wih his RSS feed for his scripting.com blog.

“I love Twitter”

“Future-safe archives”

what about that Feedburner article (note)
open source ID sysem

“open source Twitter” — “look at the Twitter API–how can that be replicated?”

“I don’t understand Facebook…I have to accept it that people like it…don’t like that it’s a walled garden”