Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

The programme is @AJStream, and it was exciting to see people I know--Biella Coleman--being interviewed, as well as to listen to an animated discussion on subjects near and dear.

Inside Views: Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Schizophrenia? | Intellectual Property Watch

Inside Views: Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Schizophrenia? | Intellectual Property Watch

Immensely useful context regarding the shift in posture from Lula to his hand-picked successor, Dima Rousseff. When I saw her inaugural speech, I was cheered by her declaration, loud, clear, and welcomed by all there, that the future lay in, and that the government would promote ICT development. Given the history of the Lula regime's advocacy of open source, via Gilberto Gil's expansive vision and actions, I had the notion that this meant more not less endorsement of open source.

I was wrong. It seems really to have meant: Let's bring back neoliberalism and make our country a yet better market for big multinationals operating without real concern for local markets; and lets close the door to open knowledge, open technologies, open source.

Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Are We All Josef K.? | Intellectual Property Watch

Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Are We All Josef K.? | Intellectual Property Watch

How this affects OOo is not necessarily obvious. But a simple account is that if under Lula there was an open door, and even an invitation to open source and to the communities enabling and supporting them, under his successor and more to the point, under the new Minister of Culture, the approach has quite changed. Gilberto Gil, the former minister, understood the benefits--cultural, social, economic--of open source; if Juca Ferreira does, that is not evident at all, at least not in any positive way.

The result is--or could be, absent actual and effective protests by those most affected by the shift in posture, is that the resistance to open source is that much stronger, and the resurgence of neoliberalism shamelessly enabled.

But what about the Novell effort on the office suite?

Attachmate's Brauckmann takes control of SUSE Linux • The Register

It's unclear: is Attachmate eliminating the effort or not? How crucial is it, as a revenue generator? 

 

Microsoft welcomes CentOS Linux onto virtualized Windows • The Register

Microsoft welcomes CentOS Linux onto virtualized Windows • The Register

A fairly good analysis of the strategy MSFT is engaging in here with Linux. The interesting things is that CentOS is a community effort, not a corporate synthetic, a departure for MSFT, as Gavin points out. By supporting CentOS, MSFT secures its market, coming and going.

But how to persuade away from the MSFT lure? it' snot just about open source. It's about, now, the usual: business, to be sure, but also, and this is rather important, establishing a network able to work with a variety of vendor environments, and to consider, seriously, subsequent developments. For instance, what formats, what apps, what other opportunities will be wanted and developed?

Open source .NET mimic rises from Novell ashes • The Register

Open source .NET mimic rises from Novell ashes • The Register

Hard not to consider this development interesting. And I'm also curious about Microsoft investment in Xamarian, the new de Icaza gig. This is not an area of indignation or FUD. It's curiosity about business politics. I'm intrigued by the map of proxies we see developing. Proxies have always added gravitational surprises to any otherwise predictable field, as they tend to operate with a funded agenda that affects markets. So, it's worth knowing about them.

All that said, I do wish Miguel and his fine team the best of luck and good fortune!

Free Software & law related links 30. IV. 2011 - 06. V. 2011 | Hook's Humble Homepage

Free Software & law related links 30. IV. 2011 - 06. V. 2011 | Hook's Humble Homepage

I have been following this blog's contents for some time, but this last week has proven particularly interesting, so I post Matija's excellent links here. I'll start making it a regular thing, to post "Hook's Humble Homepage," or the blog of FSFE Deputy Legal Coordinator Matija Šuklje.

.NET Android and iOS clones stripped by Attachmate • The Register

.NET Android and iOS clones stripped by Attachmate • The Register

This does not come as a surprise. What is interesting now, is to wonder what will happen to Novell's longtime effort to parallel OpenOffice.org code. (LibreOffice is, as far as I can tell, Novell's version, and Ubuntu has, for a long time, distributed Novell's vesion; it now does the same with LibreOffice.) Should Novell effectively withdraw--which I expect--then what will happen to LO and Ubuntu's distribution? Users will not benefit. Even though the critique of LibreOffice (and prior to that, Novell's version) has always been related to its QA (something we at OOo do particularly well, if with some overzealous vigour), still, I hardly want to see the consumer base suffer, for it affects us all in the open source world, when disruptions like this unsettle consumer expectations.

Indeed, it's been my grief that the division enacted by The Document Foundation adn LO has precisely fed into the narrative long held and maintained by those enemies of Foss that it is unpredictable, uncertain, and ultimately uneconomical: a bad decision, suitable at best for the Ivory Tower crowd or those crazy freetards in California.

Bill Blackbeard, Champion of Comic Strips, Dies at 84 - NYTimes.com

Bill Blackbeard, Champion of Comic Strips, Dies at 84 - NYTimes.com

Without Blackbeard's obsession, the rich history of comic book narrative would likely be lost, at best converted to microfilm, which is not in colour and detestable to study, let alone read for pleasure.

Preserving the originals preserves, to a degree, the original pleasure and beauty of the form. And the technology today allows us to capture the colour of the original panes. But what format do we choose to save these in? One of the virtues of the analogue ink on paper format is that it does not demand special technology to perceive. The mix of chemicals producing the effect may be proprietary but that only affects the producer, not the consumer. Not so modern edocument technology.

So we need, in order to preserve our cultural history and moment, an open technology and open standard that does not discriminate but that makes available to any artist, any person, the archive. Otherwise, we bankrupt our culture.

Bill Blackbeard, Champion of Comic Strips, Dies at 84 - NYTimes.com

Bill Blackbeard, Champion of Comic Strips, Dies at 84 - NYTimes.com

Without Blackbeard's obsession, the rich history of comic book narrative would likely be lost, at best converted to microfilm, which is not in colour and detestable to study, let alone read for pleasure.

Preserving the originals preserves, to a degree, the original pleasure and beauty of the form. And the technology today allows us to capture the colour of the original panes. But what format do we choose to save these in? One of the virtues of the analogue ink on paper format is that it does not demand special technology to perceive. The mix of chemicals producing the effect may be proprietary but that only affects the producer, not the consumer. Not so modern edocument technology.

So we need, in order to preserve our cultural history and moment, an open technology and open standard that does not discriminate but that makes available to any artist, any person, the archive. Otherwise, we bankrupt our culture.