My younger brother David is moving 1 June 2004 to Bruxelles on a 4 year contract to work for the European Science Foundation. Before leaving he invited our parents and I to brunch at Cafe Alma and for a guided tour of the historic remains of a part of the Copenhagen fortification.
The Washington DC thinktank the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has published a study that claims that Torvalds is not the real inventor of Linux but that credit and properly also important IP rights belong to Andrew Tannenbaum the creator of the Unix based OS called Minix. The study is reviewed in a CNET article and Tannenbaum himself has rebutted some of the assertions of his role made in the study.
Regardless of whether the claim in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution study has any merit, it shows that Linux and open source really have moved from the world of idealists to the world of business men. And that means among other things that nothing is sacred any more and that a “sense of community” or people “doing the right thing” cannot be counted on any more. If there are money to be made by making the most outrageuos claims so as SCO in the IBM case, there will always by someone to step and take advantage. Sadly, this means that open source business has to play by the often immoral and ruthless rules of business which among other things means to make sure that everything is covered in ironclad drafted by expensive lawyers.
I am chairman of the board of Int. Business Web Solution ApS and have had this position since 2000. It has been some tough for the company and its to founders - father and son and genuine entrepreneurs - Jan and Jacob Adeltoft, but it seems that they are finally getting their well-deserved break with the release of version 4 of their flagship product WebProof which got excellent reviews at the 2004 DRUPA fair.
After I in March posted a flaming comment on the lousy service of BT OpenZone, I received just the other day a very polite e-mail from the head of product management af BT OpenZone. In the e-mail the BT OpenZone representative apologize for the inconvenience, offers an plausible explanation of what went wrong and gives me a couple of vouchers for access next time I visit a BT OPenZone hotspot.
What to learn from this? BT OpenZone seems to care about their customers. And customer care does work. Now after being the beneficiary of some good old fashioned service my attitude towards BT OpenZone has suddenly changed to a very positive one!
Article of 21 May from Danish Computerworld, read http://www.computerworld.dk/Default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=23790.
A German court has ordered a company to stop selling its wireless router because the company was not complying with the terms of the General Public License â which underpins the distribution of most open source software.
Read more http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?page_id=germancourtupholds1082973220&area=news
As if it was necessary to find more arguments against the recently by the EU council adopted proposal for a EU directive that would further enable software patents to be issued within the EU, one of the always more persuasive agruments is that fact that the Economist is opposing the proposal (Login required).
Three university students have discovered a major flaw in wireless network technology that means hackers can bring down critical infrastructure in as little as five seconds. The researchers suggest that using the IEEE 802.11b to operate critical infrastructure could be considered negligent. But we have previously suggested on how things can be improved and DoD has released new guidelines that should help us reducing the risk further.
Rad more at http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?it=4091.
Esther Dyson talks on outsourcing and doing business in other countries during this CNET interview.
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