Older blog entries for mpawlo (starting at number 36)

I just finished my interview with Nick Moffitt. Moffitt gives tounge-in-cheek answers on questions regarding why we should not use GIFs, what refund day was about plus something on Microsoft and GNU.

I applied classical game theory to open code and I concluded that a company selling proprietary software to third parties will never open its code if the company has a competitor. If you consider open code a benefit to society, you may want to propagate open code-legislation or otherwise try to stimulate new competition in the marketplace. Otherwise companies will stay proprietary and the transformation of the software license landscape will take a very long time.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is excited to announce the grand opening today of a new cyberlaw community discussion forum: Greplaw.

Our (admittedly lofty) goal? To make Greplaw the most interesting, useful, and frequently updated source of Internet law and policy news and discussion on the Internet.

How do we plan to do that? By connecting with the ever- growing number of cyberlaw-related news sites and law weblogs. That way, we can provide a common forum for the processing and integration of ideas and perspectives on developments that impact the Internet community as a whole: the evolution of copyright, the development of DRM technology, the enactment of new Internet-related legislation, legal aspects and implications of free software and open source, privacy issues and more.

Greplaw is run by Harvard Law School students and alumni and geared for a broad audience. Thus our aim is to make cyberlaw understandable and accessible to those who are new to the subject, while giving those already "in the know" a daily dose of interesting tidbits to chew on.

We also expect to bring a little attitude into the mix.

With this announcement we invite the Internet community to join the Berkman Center to weigh in with story submissions, ideas, and (of course) opinions.

Come check it out. We'll see you there!

Regards

The Greplaw staff

Decided upon invitation from Miguel to join the Greplaw staff. Did a short write-up on the shutdown of some news groups in Norway. I sent it to Declan McCullagh who ran it on Politech and to Drew Cullen who published it at The Register. Larry Lessig visited Stockholm the other day and gave a good lecture at the University of Stockholm.

Slashdotted again. This time on a Newsforge piece I wrote recently on the implications a lemon law could have on free software. May be interesting to some advogatuhrs. I think it is great that the discussion flows, even if it sometimes can be hard to read the fierce Slashdot comments .-)

Got slashdotted today. It was quite surprising while I personally submitted the same link about two and a half months ago. Anyway - I think it is good that the discussion on public procurement and open code gets going in a larger forum.

Today Financial Times ran an article on the GNU GPL. I was quoted (scroll towards the end). There is a lot of standard Microsoft FUD in the article, but also good statements by Marten Mikkos, the CEO of MySQL, and Eben Moglen, counsel for Free Software Foundation.

Newsforge is currently running my column Encouraging open code in public procurement policies. This could be the most important issue when it comes to the success of open code. However, you may not agree with me regarding the suggested solution to the "problem". Some argue that public money should always mean open code. I think one should choose the best solution at all times defined by a combination of price, performance, security, license terms, time of delivery, and quality. Sometimes this will mean a free software solution, sometimes open source and then again - sometimes proprietary solutions. The problem today is that open code doesn't stand a chance because of standard issues and the design of public procurement. Read the column for more thoughts no this important matter.

Steve Mallet: There is - in my opinion - a much better Swedish translation made by Patrik Wallstrom and Magnus Ihse, available at Gnuheter. In the Ihse and Wallstrom translation the annotations are included and I also consider the Swedish language better in their translation.

Jmallet: Congratulations on your registration of flata.nu. If you ever build a website I guess you will get some confused visitors from Sweden while "flata" is slang for lesbian in Swedish .-)