Kim Dotcom vows to again rise from the ashes with a new online storage site, this one free and open source, built on donations, and nonprofit. Funny thing is, most of us didn’t know he needed to again play Phoenix.
Back in the early days of the 21st century, Dotcom seemed to have overcome his checkered past and to have developed the Midas touch with the popular online storage site Megaupload. Like Midas, however, he was to discover that gold is an overrated commodity, the ownership of which often creates as many problems as it solves. For one thing, you can’t eat it. For another, lots of people want to take it from you.

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux



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While Larry’s been keeping an eye on things at the self-proclaimed most-important-open-source-conference-in-the-multiverse, I’ve been keeping an eye on the happenings in the FOSS world elsewhere. In the process, I’ve managed to make Larry part of this Week in Review.
Who would ever think that Capital One, the what’s-in-your-wallet folks, would want to get serious about becoming an open source software developer? After all, it’s a banking institution, and while it’s not hard to imagine a bank would be developing some back end tools to be used in-house or by its clients, it’s not expected that it would spend big bucks publicizing these tools at OSCON.
We learned of this on Friday through Tim Anderson at The Register, who supplied
The trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization 


