Software Free

Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd.

The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable.

The dangers of retail [...]

Salesforce.com’s rapid rise to success has been the subject of much debate and speculation. Is Salesforce.com a complete anomaly, a lone black swan in a software market that remains steadfast in its traditional delivery model? In what other market category than Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has Software-as-a-Service been so wildly successful?

Amongst Linux users, there’s a shared feeling that any Linux OS is superior by far to anything Microsoft produces. More often than not, I also notice a frustration that the rest of the world doesn’t know/acknowledge/cares about this. There’s a lot of talk about converting people to Linux, and the best way to do that. But actually, it’s very easy. Here are some tips.

At his opening keynote at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Whitehurst said the company needs to start preaching to its customers to share their internally developed code with others.

The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.

In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and&nbs [...]

ICT spending in UK schools is unsustainable but it could be cut by 90% with the help of Open Source software and the latest innovations in personal computing dubbed NetBooks.

ARM wars?

The latest salvo in the new chip war gives some indication of what is to come and just how soon it will happen. NVidia’s release this week of their ARM-based Tegra CPU [...]

At lunch today I had a great connection with Joe Solomon, a Social Media Consultant, who is the Project Lead of the KnowMore.org Firefox extension.

When installed, KnowMore's icons integrate into Google's search results to help users understand data from the KnowMore database.

KnowMore is community dedicated to chronicling corporate abuses, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment, via a vast user-generated wiki database.

The extension is powered by KnowMore's new API which enables any developer to take KnowMore's corporate data and build web apps that empower consumers and help citizens hold corporations accountable.

If you are a student looking for an Office suite for college, let me inform you that Open Office 2.4 rocks; it's smart, easy to use, supports open standards, is free, can be distributed freely to your friends works on virtually any computer and now you can even get free training through the QCA approved INGOTs.

Best of all, Open Office.org's engineers have done a fanta [...]

Continuing the thread with Simon Wardley, I want to lay out a couple thoughts that Simon’s reply has prompted me to finally put into writing. This is two of two.

In Simon’s reply to my comments, he states:

However ‘Affero’ enforced that changes are to be released back and this could possibly discourage use. It could also discourage companies creating operational improvements to the system, i.e. keeping to the primitives of the platform but improving the code efficiency.

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Source: Open Source Advocacy with Reverend Ted

Continuing the thread with Simon Wardley, I want to lay out a couple thoughts that Simon’s reply has prompted me to finally put into writing. This is one of two.

In a comment reply, Simon Wardley points out that the aforementioned “SaaS Loophole” is actually a good thing. I agree. To put a finer point on it, one could make a great case that without SaaS Loophole, excellent web search results (Google) and thousands of other freely-available services on the web would have been much longer in coming around. Much of what we love about the Internet today was created by companies that used Free Software as a platform for innovation and a springboard to building a business.

Simon Wardley, formerly of Fotango, the promising company that providing a hosted Javascript environment called Zimki and that is now unfortunately defunct, recently posted a thoughtful blog entry regarding Bungee Labs’ hypothetical strategy for open source.

I had the opportunity recently to test Linux, the freeware operating system, as a standalone, bootable CD. The version I tried was SimplyMEPIS 7.0, a configuration of the Linux OS and many popular open source programs, with a good graphic user interface (GUI).

As hosted development platforms become browser-accessible, new issues will arise regarding freely sharing source code among developers. Bungee Connect’s most recent update (April 20, 200 introduced its first (and still very early) version of a source code share. This creates a hosted code repository for Bungee Connect developers, and opens a raft of questions about the future of Free Software licenses in the age of hosted development.

Allow me to outline three code-sharing scenarios, and provide some thinking on how current open source licenses might fit:

This post is prompted by some outstandingly depressing UK statistics:

The summer 2008 will see  fewer candidates taking GCE Computing than even the previous year's low, approximately 5000 out of the total of 800,000 GCE's, of which barely 600 are female; secondly the drop out rate for Computer Science at University is  now the highest of all subjects at over 10% and [...]

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian Project Leader in 2006 but was defeated by Anthony Towns by only six effective votes. In 2 [...]