I found it particularly interesting as my wife and I have debates about our music collections - she uses iTunes with an iPod and I have my whole collection in ogg format and have a nice little Samsung mp3 player. Everytime I have to lend her some support (which mainly consists of updating either the iPod or iTunes every single time it is hooked up to the PC) I'm always grumbling and she is always asking why.

Things got particularly funny the last time as iTunes would not let me transfer a song she had purchased to the iPod because the iPod needed an update. When I tried to do that, it wanted the PC to reboot (huh???). Upon doing that, I could not get the PC to reboot - just got to the XP splashscreen with the green progress bar. I finally figured out how to use the restore utility from Safe mode to get the blasted thing running again and I have not retried it since. So much for the whole "it just runs" concept of Windows.

In an interesting side note, over the past couple days I've been getting my PC and laptop up to speed after some updates. I happened to find this awesome article on making SuSE 10.1 the perfect desktop. Following those directions, I was watching DVD's using VLC in no time. I was not so lucky with XP Pro on my laptop. As I discovered, even though Windows is supposed to be such a great multimedia system out of the box, it will not play a DVD (at least not a commercial DVD). No, you have to install a DVD decoder and unless you hunt like I did, they all cost $$$. And here I was under the impression that such functionality was a native part of Windows.

Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet

Balthaser says he began to develop rich-media application processes while developing Websites for large corporate clients in the late 1990s using Macromedia Flash 3.

The term "Rich Internet Application" was introduced in a Macromedia whitepaper in March 2002, though the concept had been around for a number of years before that under different names such as:

• Remote Scripting, by Microsoft, circa 1998
• X Internet, by Forrester Research in October 2000
• Webtop, coined by Hummingbird Ltd for their DM WebServer product in February 2002,
• Rich (Web) Clients,
• Rich Web Application

There is a section in the article about corporate blogging/bloggers in which Gillmor really takes Lyons' recent piece (Attack of the Blogs - you could possibly access it here if you were willing to pay, but I wouldn't recommend it. Forbes' decision to keep the article under lock and key only puts them at a significant disadvantage.) to task:

Giving up a certain amount of control raises many issues, including legal ones. A recent cover story in Forbes - fear-mongering about how wicked bloggers can wreck corporate reputations - raised a few fair points, but then drowned them in melodrama and wrongheaded advice. Should companies respond to what others say about them online, especially in blogs? Lies should certainly be countered with the truth. But honorable critics and observers want to get things right. Engagement and respect go further than brandishing legal threats (one of Forbes' uglier suggestions. Companies that engage in discussions outside of their own marketing machines, even when the discussion makes insiders uncomfortable, are only adding to their credibility.

In the same issue of CIO Insight, there is an article Trolling for Dollars that I thought was a nice summary of the problem with software and business process patents. Every time I read an article like this one, I don't know whether I should cry over the stupidity of people in the world or get angry about it. As Forrest Gump said, maybe "a little bit of both." One example was a patent just awarded to Amazon.com(and I buy a lot of books from Amazon, always liked them, but more and more I find myself po'ed at them over stuff like this) covering its method for "encouraging users to write reviews of products they've bought." Hmmm - I could swear I've run across a store or two in my lifetime that had some letter they received from a customer pasted to the wall for others to read. And there is always the old adage about pleasing the customer, lest they tell 10 people about their bad experience (implying they are sharing their "review" of what they bought). I'm just really confused as to how it is that "common sense prior art" does not seem to exist within the halls of the USPTO. Anyway, I would highly recommend the article to our readers.

Finally, Happy New Year to everyone!

Nevertheless, I just ran across this article - Pitfalls In An Open Source World by Mitch Wagner in InformationWeek. Wagner refers to Mark Rankin with ADP Dealer Services in making this statement

They need to be careful where they get code that they believe to be open source and be sure the code doesn't have licensing provisions that could cost their employers money in the future

More formally the case is known as Davidson & Assoc. v. Internet Gateway, or sometimes as DAVIDSON & ASSOCIATES etc. et al, v. Tim Jung, etc. et al..  The case number is 04-3654.  For more information see the Court's website at:

http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov

An audio recording of the hearing is available (I haven't tried it) at:

http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/tmp/043654.html

The gist of his assertion seems to be that many open source contributors work for companies with IP policies which under some circumstances leave their contributions open to legal question.  Quoting Brown, from the article:

"Every day, an untold amount (sic) of employees beholden to strict employee/invention/intellectual property agreements, in their spare time (and even during work-hours) freely give away ideas, code, and products to open source projects."

Work on this article really commenced a couple weeks ago when I noticed an item in The Register's RSS feed about the BSA being opposed to the European Commission's policy on the use of open standards. Since then, we've also seen news about some misgivings some have about OASIS's approach to open standards.

With this article, I am going to try to explain in a very basic manner how the standards setting process works, what the meaning or significance of some of this recent news is, and take a look at how Microsoft may be using "open standards" as a means to further their ends and destroy FOSS. Please bear in mind this is coming from a "lay" person - hopefully I understood everything I researched well enough to write about it correctly, but corrections are welcome.

I am an engineer and I am required to pay attention to small details. OK, I'll admit that I am anal retentive. Engineers that do not pay attention to small details wind up causing Mars landers to be Mars crashers for example.

I have been seeing the statement that "the GPL is the most widely used FOSS license" a lot recently. This statement disturbs me for two reasons.

Firstly, what is the metric? This statement is so vague that I have no idea what it means. Is it used by more authors of FOSS code? Is it used by more FOSS projects? Are there more lines of code available under this license? Please define what 'most widely used' means. Without defining a metric for 'most widely used,' it seems like a hollow marketing description. Not as vague as 'new and improved,' but you get my drift.

Secondly, I am not certain that it is even true. There is a huge amount of code available under BSD and MIT/X11 style licenses. I know that 10 years ago there was considerably more lines of code available under BSD and MIT/X11 style licenses then there was licensed by the GPL.