I’ve seen other articles talk about patronage, and maybe it’s time for some more experiments.
Before the Internet, MP3, ebooks and DivX ;-), intellectual property had a natural scarcity: it was distributed in some physical form. As long as the publisher made sure that people weren’t distributing counterfeit copies of their goods, there wasn’t much to worry about. Today, that physical protection is quickly disappearing. Napster provided a new means for people to get and distribute music. Movies are not far behind. And, as soon as book readers start to have some features that are more appealing than a traditional book, ebooks will catch on and you’ll start seeing books circulating more on line.
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Politics
CNET has an interview with Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s VP in charge of Windows XP. To some extent, Allchin’s comments make sense. It’s Microsoft’s job to try to build products with features that people will want. However, he skirted the issue of Microsoft’s monopoly position. I don’t think there’s any real question that Microsoft can destroy competition through Windows, and I don’t trust that kind of control in their hands.
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Dave Winer’s thread about gender in high tech continues with this DaveNet piece. Thought provoking reading (as is often the case with Dave). He comments that men are the artists and women are the infrastructure… which could be true, because that historically seems to have been the case. But, now that women are really being given freedom to pursue traditionally male interests, perhaps we’ll see more women on the “artist” side of things.
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CNN reports on the ultimate cubicle, designed by Scott Adams and IDEO. Astroturf or persian rug tiles, snap on hammock, boss monitor, happy flower and wastebasket… this is the ultimate!
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ZDNet reports that governments are increasingly choosing open source software. This is certainly one way for the Software Commons to pick up. The more organizations that start choosing open source for their baseline software, the more momentum that builds for other organizations to make the switch.
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Adam Vandenberg talks about how the Common Language Runtime changes languages. This is a good point. One of the things I like about Jython is that it is Python, runtime libraries and all.
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Craig Burton comments on VA Linux’s move to sell software. I think he’s on the mark here. (As if you hadn’t guessed from reading The Software Commons). I’ve never been a believer in Free Software. I’ve generally thought of the Open Source folks as being a bit more pragmatic.
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Philip Greenspun responded to a request for information about what technology to learn. His response was Microsoft .NET. After a bit of push back from Dave Winer, he qualified that he is a very big fan of the unification of languages allowed by .NET. I disagreed with his assessment of Java, however. My response follows…
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Microsoft has been found guilty, even in the Court of Appeals, of abusing its Windows monopoly. I say, “let the punishment fit the crime.”
We’ve seen all sorts of remedies proposed for the Microsoft case: splitting up Microsoft into multiple, equal companies, splitting Internet Explorer into a separate company, separating Windows from Office (which was Judge Jackson’s choice). Microsoft is guilty of using their monopoly power in Windows to establish otherwise separate products. They have used their position to squeeze other competitors out of business.
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An excellent first part of an article at Linuxworld about giving desktop computer users at the office what they need at a low cost. I mean a really low cost. There are some real merits to what’s presented in this article, I’m just not sure how many people are ready to move that far away from Windows.
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