There’s lots of noise on the wires about Sun’s choice of CDDL (a Mozilla-style license). Simon Phipps dissects the arguments and ends with a nice summary of three main classes of license.
If you’re looking at open sourcing code, this post is a must read. If you hate Sun, don’t bother to read it.
Very humorous observation about the point in the future where people will suspend belief about what’s possible. Danny Hillis always used to say that the 21st century was the future, but it got closer and closer as the 20th drew to a close.
Via Spencer Katt, attributed to Chris Maden: “XML is like violence: If it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.”
David Isenberg excerpts a very interesting segment from a recent Bruce Sterling article.
Lessig says he won’t publish under a restrictive copyright license again.
From Clay Shirky: “Fascinating new effort called Social Physics…”
Ed Felten summarizes:
“Cameron Wilson, Director of the ACM Public Policy Office in Washington, looks at changes (made already or widely reported) in the new Congress and what they tell us about likely legislative action. (He co-writes the ACM U.S. Public Policy Blog, which is quite good.)
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A good analysis of why Wikipedia et al might continue to work, even under various attacks and criticism: First Two Laws of Commons-Based Peer Production (Ross Mayfield)
Fraser Speirs: “Appcasting is the practice of using the enclosure feature of RSS 2.0 feeds to deliver updates and release notes for new software applications.”
(Via ranchero.com.)
Ed Felten had a nice post talking about the inherent design decisions in toll booth transponders (e.g. EZPass) and what they mean for functionality v. privacy. I was intrigued in the application by Texas A & M where they used it to calculate traffic flow on specific highways.
Since toll transponders area form of RFID (active tags), this post also applies to the flow of RFID-tagged goods through the retail, pharmaceutical and DoD supply chains.