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Red Hat Alum, Chris Blizzard talks about the future of Firefox.
The Future of Firefox: Chris Blizzard speaks at SCALE
Mozilla’s long-term goal, said Blizzard, is to “make sure the web remains a viable platform.” He spoke about some of the emerging changes in the Internet ecosystem and expressed concern about new technologies like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR, which he describes as proprietary stacks that threaten to displace open standards. Mozilla aims to guard the web against potential vendor lock-in by delivering truly vendor-neutral technologies that are accessible to all web users and developers.
Or else what? Apparently, or else nothing for now.
Controversial college funding bill passed—P2P proviso intact
Despite the MPAA’s recent admission that its collegiate file-swapping numbers were wildly inaccurate, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act sailed through the House today by a 354-58 margin with its controversial intellectual property provisions still in place.
COAA makes a host of changes to the higher education landscape in the US, but for our purposes, the most interesting was the requirement that schools make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping and that they also make plans to implement network filtering. Not making such plans would carry no consequences, however, and we’re told by House staffers that no one’s federal financial aid is in danger.
Bruce Perens - State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source
Our most pervasive penetration has been in business servers and embedded systems. These days there are, for the most part, two sorts of businesses regarding Open Source use: ones whose management is aware of how much they depend on Open Source, and the ones where the boss doesn’t know yet.
In contrast, we have not yet achieved the penetration that we might have desired on user desktop systems, at least if you don’t count the fact that Free Software provides a large part of Apple’s MacOS today, and critical elements of Microsoft Windows as well. Both companies have been forced to develop strategies to live with us, some of them less comfortable than others. Today we are seeing much of the value of software move from the desktop to the network, an area in which we are already entrenched. This can only lead to the expansion of Open Source on the systems in individual user’s hands.
There been a phenomenon of wealth creation by Open Source companies, starting with Red Hat’s IPO and leading most recently to the purchase of MySQL for 1.1 Billion dollars seven years after the company’s creation. But I would warn those of you who consider Open Source by its companies: you’re missing the biggest part of the phenomenon. Most Open Source today is software being produced by its users, for its users. The largest part of the payment for Open Source development today comes from cost-center budgets of IT users, be they companies, institutions, or individuals, rather than profit-centers based on Open Source like that of MySQL. By participating in Open Source development, users distribute the cost and risk of the development of enabling technology and infrastructure for their businesses. Their profit centers are not tied to software sales, but to some other business. To find them, look to the communities rather than the companies.
Perens goes on to talk about software patents at some length. The whole thing is well worth the time it takes to read.
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
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The death of software patents?
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Fight Vandalism
More on GPL-compliant patent settlement
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