Free Software Linux

This looks tiny: A Chinese Internet company has sued Microsoft for patent infringement over its use of RSS* in Windows Vista. Wang Jianbo, chairman of China E-commerce Info Tech Company, said his firm applied for a patent on RSS services in 2005 and was granted patent ZL 2005 1 0022721.3 in December 2007 from China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Wang says Microsoft adopted RSS technology in Vista without his company's authorisation.It's actually huge. Here's what is going on.

Last week I was talking at the Open Everything meeting in London, where I went through some (most) of my tropes about openness and the creation of a commons, about enclosure (of land, creativity and ideas), how today's open movements are based on the economics of abundance, not scarcity, and are actually a return to a pre-lapsarian state, rather than something inherently new. What was particularly heartening about the occasion was meeting so many other people with similar viewpoints, albeit coming from slightly different starting positions. Indeed, one of the most positive signs that something is afoot is the broad-based nature of this growing unanimity around the world.

For those who find this hard to grasp, here's a picture that may help. (Via QuestionCopyright.org.)

Recently there have been numerous discussions on software and media piracy, with a few people even saying that open source could be the solution to stopping software piracy... However, software piracy is one of open source's biggest enemies, and few people realize that.

One of the perennial debates about the GNU/Linux desktop is how much it should resemble Windows. Usually, the debate is framed in terms of whether the desktop should look familiar to new users, or be developed in whatever way seems most logical. read more

Do as I say, not as I do, seems to be the case with Sony: PointDev, un éditeur français, attaque la maison de disques en justice pour avoir utilisé sans licence un de ses outils d'administration : Ideal Migration. [PointDev, a French software publisher, is taking the record company to court for having used one of its administration tools, Ideal Migration, without a licence.] Well let's hope these scurvy Sony dogs feel the full force of the law. (Via Planet Creative Commons.)

I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.