Open Source Initiative

CNN reports Laptops bring lessons, maybe even peace. It's good to see the One Laptop Per Child project back on track.

To me, the most exciting thing about the One Laptop Per Child project is that it dared to challenge educational and capitalistic orthodoxy, offering an authentic platform for true experiential learning. The concept of open source was absolutely essential to the vision, not because kids cannot hack binary code--they do it all the time. But because virtually all proprietary software licenses make real learning--learning through experimentation and discussion--illegal. It makes absolutely no sense to put into a child's hands software that cannot be read, modified, and shared at the very same time when we are trying to teach children how to read, how to manipulate things, and how to share.

In December of 2008 it was discovered that Bernie Madoff may have perpetrated a scheme that defrauded investors of as much as $50B USD. With a fraud so large, the scandal cut across a wide range of social classes, from the financial aristocracy to the merely comfortable. One of the many questions asked was "how could such a large fraud have escaped detection for so long?" It turns out that people had been trying to blow the whistle on Bernie Madoff for 10 years, but such whistle-blowing fell on deaf ears, perhaps because the regulators were simply too impressed with Madoff's self-described success to do their jobs effectively.

In the wake of that embarrassment, regulators decided they might as well follow up on tips of another fraud that had been reported since at least 1999.

The latest news from Harrison Consoles (a company that pioneered the use of Linux in high-end audio applications) announces that Universal Studios has upgraded their massive theatrical mixing console with Harrison's latest Linux automation system.

Last week I posted a story titled Are we really wasting $1T USD annually?" and I used our spiffy Drupal software to attach a PDF document to that blog posting. This was the first time I used the attachment feature, and what I didn't know was that unless you were logged into the site (as I was), you couldn't see it.

My apologies.

I have now made the paper available via an explicit link in the article. Or you can click through to the paper from this link.

I am traveling again, and I am reading again. Today I am in Dubai, and on the way I read two great books: The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson and Remix by Larry Lessig.

Last week I was quoted by the BBC saying that taken as a whole, the world wastes $1 trillion (with a 'T') dollars on information and communications technology. And judging by the various blog postings that have been generated in reaction to that, I estimate that fewer than 20% have any quibbles at all with that number, meaning that more than 80% are ready to see a change in how we do software and technology in the 21st century.

Tom Callaway is the Fedora Engineering Manager, at Red Hat, and he's one of the key people keeping watch over the many and sundry licensing issues that crop up when thousands of software packages come together to make a Linux distribution. Love them or hate them, Tom was and is one of the key architects of Fedora's legal policies.

And now he's mad.

As a rule, I really enjoy reading the Economist. I find its articles to be well researched and its editorial positions to be well-reasoned. I also have a soft spot for it, as the Economist was the first "mainstream" business magazine to treat the topic of open source software with any degree of seriousness. (WIRED magazine was not exactly mainstream when it first treated the subject and most of the business weekies were stuck in the "if these crazy kids have their way, Bill Gates will be standing in the soup line before long" meme--not exactly credible.) The article Small Is Beautiful brings to light one of the most important trends of personal computing: the netbook.

Sam Folk-Williams recently blogged a response to an earlier blog posting I had written about Open Source and Sustainability. Over the past few months I've been having more and more discussions about this topic with IT executives, and I have been meaning to write and update on the latest. Sam's posting provides the perfect prompt and background.

Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article titled The practical problem with software patents, a subject near and dear to my heart. He draws on the same research that I have cited in the past, the book "Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk," by Boston University professors, James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer, but I confess that he shows both greater insights and certainly a better sense of humor than I do when I write abou the subject.