These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3) labor market. In more detail:
- Direct profits: Single-vendor commercial open source. Single-vendor open source projects are open source projects dominated or owned by a single firm. This firm wants to earn direct revenue streams from the project and become or remain profitable based on these revenues. Thus, this area of open source economics is about growing new software firms. Examples are MySQL, SugarCRM, and Jaspersoft. I’ve explained how some of this works in the article “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.”
- Public welfare: Community open source. Community open source projects are open source projects that are run by a diverse community of stakeholders; unlike single-vendor commercial open source, there is no single dominant owner. Community open source creates public welfare in the form of high-quality software that people can use for free and that innovators can build on. A maturing community open source project typically joins or creates an open source foundation to become sustainable. Examples are Linux, Apache, and Gnome. I’ve explained some of the economics behind this in the paper “The Economic Case for Open Source Foundations.”
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Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers’ activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.
As cloud computing moves data and services from local systems to remote centres, the question of security for organisations must be addressed. A research paper published in the International Journal of Services and Standards suggests that a cloud-free security model is the best way forward and will circumvent the fact that cloud service providers are not yet meeting regulations and legal standards.
In the early days of computing, users accessed resources using desktop terminals connected to a mainframe. The personal computer changed all that uniting the input, processing and output devices in a single machine.
Fedora 13 alpha has been released, and the faithful are encouraged to download, test and report. The traditional method of testing is to download a full CD iso image (about 700 MB), but if you read the recent post about Network booting with boot.fedoraproject.org, you’d have learned that all you now need to do to install any version of Fedora is to download a very small iso image (626 KB).
When that article was published, Fedora 13 had not yet been released, so the option to install it was not available in BFO. The screenshot below shows BFO’s installation page before the release of Fedora 13 alpha.
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”
My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.
In the future, getting a broadband connection might be as simple as flipping on a light switch. In fact, according to a group of researchers from Germany, the light coming from the lamps in your home could one day encode a wireless broadband signal.
As of now, the majority of wireless in homes and businesses is achieved through a radio-frequency WiFi connection. But WiFi has limited bandwidth, and it’s unclear where to find more in the already-crowded radio spectrum. By contrast, visible-frequency wireless has all the bandwidth one could want.
Boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO) is Fedora’s implementation of boot.kernel.org, a project designed to give computers the capability to boot from a network. The actual program that provides this capability is gPXE, which evolved from the Etherboot project. Fedora’s twist on gPXE allows you to network-boot current, past and future (Rawhide) releases of Fedora. All you need to do is download a small iso image (the current BFO weighs in at just 626 KB), transfer it to a media, boot of that media and perform any number of tasks that you would normally perform with a full CD or DVD iso image. The next few shots will take you through the features of BFO.
The Obama Administration has been slowly ramping up its attention to intellectual property issues. Over the past few months, we’ve seen an IP “summit” at the White House. We’ve seen the successful nomination of a new cabinet-level “IP Czar” position. We’ve seen the announcement of a new DOJ task force for IP issues. What does it all portend?
Unfortunately, many signs suggest that the administration is paying far more attention to the interests of the entertainment industry than to the public good. At the same time, there are a few positive efforts and indications, so we’re holding out hope that things could improve.
The March 2010 issue of BSD Magazine, a free, online magazine for the BSD community, is now available for download. The theme for this edition is “BSD as a Desktop.” The following are some of the articles you’ll find inside:
- Build Your Own FreeBSD Update Server – Experienced users or administrators responsible for several machines or environments, know the difficult demands and challenges of maintaining such an infrastructure. The article outlines the steps involved in creating an internal FreeBSD Update Server.
- Using OpenBSD and PF as a Virtual Firewall for Windows – The Windows firewall, by default, has many open ports to the local network, like the file and print sharing service ports, which are the source of many security holes. How to protect a Windows host with a basic configuration of an OpenBSD virtual machine with PF as a NAT router and firewall?
As mobile phones become increasingly powerful and can store more data, we’ve introduced new methods of search to get you to your content faster, such as search suggestions or search by voice. But sometimes, typing to get to the right search suggestion takes too long, and you may be in a quiet environment where speaking a query is inappropriate. Today we’re pleased to announce Gesture Search, a new Google Labs application for Android-powered devices running Android 2.0 or above in the US. Gesture Search lets you quickly find a contact, an installed application, a bookmark or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items, by simply drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen.
Twelve years after the passage of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the law continues to stymie fair use, free speech, scientific research, and legitimate competition. A new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) collects reported examples of abuses of the DMCA and the ongoing harm the law continues to inflict on consumers, scientists, and small businesses.
The U.S. Copyright Office is currently mulling proposed exemptions to the DMCA’s ban on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and “other technical protection measures” used to restrict access to copyrighted works. The Copyright Office is empowered to grant exemptions to the law every three years to mitigate the harms that DRM otherwise would impose on legitimate, non-infringing uses of copyrighted materials.
Forget iris and fingerprint scans — scanning noses could be a quicker and easier way to verify a person’s identity, according to scientists at the University of Bath.
With worries about illegal immigration and identity theft, authorities are increasingly looking to using an individual’s physical characteristics, known as biometrics, to confirm their identity.
The personal health and financial information stored in thousands of North American home computers may be vulnerable to theft through file-sharing software, according to a research study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Healthcare professionals who take patient information home to personal computers containing peer-to-peer file-sharing software are jeopardizing patient confidentiality, note the authors of the study.
Vine Linux is a Japanese, RPM-based, multi-purpose distribution. It is developed and maintained by Vinecaves, and it’s based on an earlier version of Fedora. It is one of those distributions that excludes non-free (proprietary) applications from its default installation. Unlike similar distributions, however, it has developed a smart method to make installing non-free applications very easy.
