- Matt Asay says every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer ASAP. I disagree; every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer, in late 2009. :)
- Tim Lee and Derek Slater point out that there is a huge, vibrant infrastructure around handling your mp3s, and nothing comparable for DVDs, because of the DMCA. Neither mentioned AppleTV, but they should have- I think it is going to be much less successful than iPod because there is no TV/DVD equivalent of Rip, Mix, Burn. (AppleTV’s web page says ‘bring iTunes to your TV’, much less interesting than ‘bring the web to your TV’ or ‘bring all video to your TV’, really.)
- Mike Linksvayer thinks that the iPhone isn’t revolutionary because it isn’t open. I think I disagree; revolutions can happen along any of multiple dimensions, and iPhone’s ease of use and advanced integration with the PC can be revolutionary, even if the closedness (patents, crappy Cingular-only network) are more of the Same Old Stuff. More on that later; but in a nutshell I feel like I’m working on a really, really nice horse and buggy right now, and Apple just released prototypes for a model T.
- JB Zimmerman thinks interestingly about property rights in virtual worlds. I’m going to write a lot about that soon, since I’m taking both IP and Real Property right now.
January, 2007
10
Jan 07
misc. links before I go to my 8am class (ugh)
9
Jan 07
circularity of real and intellectual property
Besides Constitutional Law and Criminal Law, I’m taking both Property (aka land, stuff- ‘real’ property) and Principles of Intellectual Property (mentioned earlier today.) I expected the IP class to refer to the property class, but maybe not to this extent.
My intellectual property class is being co-taught by a real property prof. He wrote the textbook… for my real property class (bio). The textbook cites Lessig’s blog posts about Google Print while discussing whether airplane overflights are trespass. (This post, and this followup.) I did not expect to get a Lessig reference in real property before I saw one in IP. (To be fair, there was a very passing CC reference in IP class today, in discussion of the use of terms other than ‘property’ to discuss IP. Point still stands. :)
8
Jan 07
lazy man’s post
Sr. O’Grady has written a basically perfect post on the open source second life client, hitting the right notes about the client, about the code base, and about the server. Go read it.
8
Jan 07
“you’re going to be a douchebag in that class, aren’t you” (aka, confessions of a maybe-gunner)
(Completely personal ramble coming; skip it if you’re not interested in the internal monologue of an IP junkie 1L. I’m writing the post mostly to force myself to think through some options (including trying to understand better both my temptations and revulsions), not because I think it will actually be interesting to anyone.)
Sigh. Quote in subject is from a friend/classmate on the way out of Principles of Intellectual Property. The class is going to be a challenge for me; I love to think about (and talk about) the topic; I’m well versed in it, so I’ll likely be ahead of the game, at least early in the semester; and (generally) there are lots of assumptions that irritate me, so I’m often going to want to (1) correct assumptions or (2) throw something, and (2) is definitely not an option. So yeah… in short, I’m likely to be the gunner for this class. (I’m not that bad. But the link gives you the idea.)
The problem is that I don’t want to be the gunner. Sometimes I look back and feel like I’ve been that guy in virtually every classroom I’ve ever been in. I think I mostly avoided it last semester, and I don’t think I’ll be very tempted in most of my other classes this semester, but it is going to come out with a vengeance in this class. Some part of me says ‘it doesn’t matter’, but most of me says ‘I’d rather not be the central square in everyone’s gunner bingo card’.
I’m really not sure what the best strategy is to control the impulse. The extreme version would be to just never volunteer at all in class and just go to office hours and talk there; the less extreme version might be to only volunteer when I see a really bad assumption- as opposed to answering the inevitable ‘will someone volunteer’ questions. I’m afraid that may still be daily, though. Might just try to limit myself to one comment a week- that is every other class, on average; should be small enough not to irritate my classmates, and would force me to focus on the interesting stuff. Gah… oh well. I’ll figure it out. Off to cure this headache and start on Property reading…
[Ed.: the wisest person I know suggests that if I can just stick to 'Learn, Not Teach', I'll be fine... I think I'll go tattoo that to my forehead or something. It was never my intent to lecture my classmates, just to ask probing questions so I can better understand, but still... it won't hurt for me to chant that like a mantra.]
6
Jan 07
pledge-drive bounty system example for nvidia drivers
I’ve written in the past about use of online pledge systems to fund bounty-style payoffs for developers, so I thought I’d note that the nouveau project appears to be doing something similar. So far over halfway to the pledge drive goal with a month remaining- which is very interesting. I have pledged (free drivers are ultra-critical to our long-term health), though I wish they’d been much more explicit about what/who the money will go to (and I might not pay up on the pledge until they are at least a little more clear on that.)
4
Jan 07
Alan still has a wicked sense of humor.
A list of patents filed by Alan Cox. (Note that many of these are just applications and not yet granted.) I’m particularly amused by the application for a patent on DRM. (Note that I can laugh because of Red Hat’s patent pledge.) Now I just need to find a site which will give me an RSS feed of patent applications filtered by assignee…
[Update later: it is clear from my comments that this post wasn't clear. Let me restate: I think this is a good, or at least not bad thing- RH's patent pledge makes it very clear that this will not be used against Free Software; and unlike many other mundane RH patents, this one could (hypothetically) be used against Real Bad Guys. I don't think that it was bad for Alan, or RH, to apply for this patent in a defensive manner.]
4
Jan 07
followup to yesterday’s post on GNOME 10.0×10.0
There were some good comments on yesterday’s post; I was going to respond there but I figure they deserve more visibility than they’d get buried in my comments.
I should note that I should not have said ‘GNOME 3.0′ yesterday. GNOME 3.0 implies that we need a successor to GNOME 2.x; I don’t think that is the best way to think about the next GNOME. It might be better to say that GNOME 2.x is Enterprise Desktop GNOME, just like Maemo is (approximately) Handheld GNOME and OLPC is (approximately) Education GNOME. What we probably need is ‘radical user experience improvement GNOME’ in parallel with all those other efforts- GNOME 10.0 x 10.0 is a joke, but you get the idea.
I agree, but more practically the choice of an appropriate BDFL [for the next GNOME] is between what, 6-10 people? –John
The choice of the BDFL is between whoever does the work to generate new ideas and new code. If you have a list of 6-10 people already in mind, you’re looking at whoever has, in the past, generated code or ideas. This isn’t to dump on those people- they have by definition done great work, and good leaders- but leadership for The Next Generation has to come from those doing the work in the Next Generation. Might be the same people, but my guess is that it won’t be, and we certainly can’t know who they are until the work has started- we can’t appoint them beforehand.
Wouldn’t be a start to agree on a GNOME 3.0 mission statement?–Quim
That is exactly the kind of group-planning stuff that Kathy predicts makes for boring, predictable products. The mission statement for what I should call GNOME NG (the relationship with GNOME 2.x (aka the Enterprise Desktop) is tenuous at best, so 3.x is the wrong term to use) is ‘create a radically new and improved user experience’. You can’t plan it much more than that. If it can be planned, it isn’t radically new; it is still an extension of the Enterprise Desktop. I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this one, since it relies on serendipity instead of planning- but I’m pretty confident I’ll be right.
There shouldn’t be this continual hand-wringing about how we get to 3.0. We should be strong enough to say that right now, 3.0 doesn’t matter.–Alex
So, I like GNOME 2.x. I think it is really useful for a lot of people; we likely have at least a million users of various stripes, probably more. But I don’t think we get to 10×10 (or anything like it) without radically changing the user experience. We just don’t have a persuasive reason for Windows users or Windows developers to switch without radical change and improvement. (My posts in early July have some thinking along those lines, and in April of 2005 I listed some potential directions experimenters could go.) So yeah, I think a new gnome software paradigm (almost certainly in parallel with, not as a replacement for Enterprise GNOME, aka 2.x) is important for the long-term health of gnome, the community and the project. (The overarching project for Enterprise GNOME, OLPC, Maemo, etc., being ‘make free software the primary computer interface of the masses’, more or less.)
In short, most people’s current visions can be implemented using the available libraries. –Rob
Almost certainly. Given the continued support Enterprise Desktop GNOME (2.x) will have for many years to come, I’d expect to see something like what the maemo folks are doing- occasionally having temporary forks to work out differences in functionality, but generally working together to enhance a core platform.
There is one area where this might not hold true, or at least, where a large amount of work needs to be done- the competition/integration with (or perhaps cooption of) web apps. See my post from July on this. This problem absolutely must be solved for our platform to have any chance at long-term relevance, and the solutions might be radical enough that they might require substantial divergence from the Enterprise Platform. (Solving the problem might, for example, suggest just wholesale adoption of XUL, or something similarly radical.)
3
Jan 07
Dumbness of Crowds and GNOME 3.0
I’m more and more convinced that we’re not going to get to 3.0 as an organization- we’re too afraid to fail (for reasonable reasons), we have too few resources, we are too enamored with planning,etc., etc.- I’m now fairly convinced that 3.0 is most likely to happen when someone goes out, experiments, probably fails, but get people interested in their experiment (and maybe their failure) and gets momentum about finishing the experiment and turning it into reality. That experimentation will light a fire under GNOME’s ass and encourage new blood as well.
Kathy Sierra writes (draws) today:
It is Kathy, so of course, read the whole thing.
Note that the structure of the law (really, most the structure of most institutions) makes this very difficult. It is perhaps easier* for software developers to do this kind of individual, world-impacting innovation than in any other field, so go out there and take advantage of it- stop talking about GNOME 3.0, start prototyping the ideas that will be GNOME 3.0, and people will follow.
* subject to the need for servers if you’re doing web dev.