Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Business”

Old FOSS Friend & Foe Represents Sony in Hack

By Christine Hall on December 25, 2014 |

Browsers, Business, Copyright, Operating Systems and Politics

Old FOSS Friend & Foe Represents Sony in HackDavid Boies

Folks who follow news about FOSS, OSS and Linux who also watch the “talking heads” shows the TV networks serve up on Sunday mornings might be excused for not noting that David Boies, the lawyer speaking for Sony on this week’s “Meet the Press,” has on several occasions been involved in news stories affecting Linux. Over the years, he’s played the role of both friend and foe, but it’s been a while since his and the FOSS world’s paths have crossed.

David Boies
David Boies speaking at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Photograph by Doc Searls
Back in the days of the Clinton Administration, Boies became something of a hero to FOSS and Linux supporters when he represented the Justice Department in “United States vs. Microsoft,” which went to trial in May of 1998. This antitrust suit by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Attorneys General of twenty U.S. states, found Microsoft being accused of illegal and unfair competition. In October of the same year, the U.S. Department of Justice also sued Microsoft additionally for violating a 1994 consent decree by including Internet Explorer as part of Windows.

Continue readingOld FOSS Friend & Foe Represents Sony in Hack

Sony & North Korea: Dumb & Dumber

By Christine Hall on December 22, 2014 |

Business, Copyright, Humor, Media, News, Politics and Security

Hacking, hacking, everywhere hacking. And not the good kind either. We’re talking cracking hacking.

Take the Sony hack for instance. Bunches of movies set for Christmas release are now available online for free, for those willing to break the law and invoke the displeasure of the MPAA while firing up the ol’ BitTorrent. Worse than that: even more bunches of Sony employees have had their financial lives turned upside down, with all of their personal information leaked. Not so bad, however, is the news that “The Interview” won’t be making an appearance on a screen near you anytime soon.

Oddly, it’s that last tidbit that’s been getting the most press. That, and the ongoing argument on who’s to blame for the Sony crack hack.

At first, U.S. authorities said that the North Koreans didn’t do it. Then they said they did. The North Koreans countered with a “no-way-Jose” and offered to help in the hunt to find the real culprit, which elicited an adamant “no-way-back-atcha” from the U.S.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingSony & North Korea: Dumb & Dumber
MPAA Wants to Use DMCA to Effectively Bring Back SOPAMPAA logo

MPAA Wants to Use DMCA to Effectively Bring Back SOPA

By Christine Hall on December 18, 2014 |

Business, Copyright, Internet, Media and News

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Winston Smith’s job was to rewrite the past for the Inner Party. Mainly, he made people vanish from the pages of history. Anyone who came under the party’s bad graces suddenly disappeared from all media; from all newspaper articles, books, television archives and any other mentions. In Orwell’s world, anyone declared a nonperson was completely erased. S/he never existed.

According to memos leaked from the recent hack on Sony, the big studios would like to employ a Winston Smith to remove domain name listings from ISPs DNS directories, effectively removing entire websites from the Internet for most users, as if they never existed.

MPAA logo
MPAA Logo
The movie moguls want to do this in the name of fighting their old monster-under-the-bed, content piracy. Not surprisingly, they plan on evoking an old enemy of a free and open Internet in the process, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while attempting to revive at least a part of the ghost of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was killed back in 2011.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingMPAA Wants to Use DMCA to Effectively Bring Back SOPA
Debian, Ubuntu Touch & More…Debian community distro

Debian, Ubuntu Touch & More…

By Christine Hall on November 28, 2014 |

Business, Distros, Mobile and News

FOSS Week in Review

Larry’s taking a much deserved day off, so I got elected to do this Week in Review. Glad to be back in the saddle.

Here’s hoping that all in the U.S. had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and that those of you who don’t live here managed to make it through all of the online articles on our quaint little holiday. As always, one thing leads to another. In this case, giving thanks for what we have morphs into the great Christmas shopping race, in which we make a grab for stuff we don’t yet own.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Google and the EU

Google logoWhile we in the States were dealing with family and turkey, the EU was busy working on preparing Google’s head for the platter. The European Parliament yesterday passed by a wide margin a non-binding resolution urging anti-trust regulators to break up the company. For those keeping score, the final vote was 384 yeas and 174 nays.

Yesterday also saw France and Germany seeking a review, from the European Competition Commission, of the EU’s rules to ensure that international Internet companies could be targeted in the olde world.

Google has been tangling with our friends across the pond since at least 2010 on a host of subjects, which include privacy issues, “right to be forgotten” rules, copyrights, tax questions and more. The resolution didn’t mention Google by name, but asked for the Commission to consider proposals to separate search engines from their other services.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingDebian, Ubuntu Touch & More…
Firefox to Default to Yahoo’s Microsoft SearchFirefox logo

Firefox to Default to Yahoo’s Microsoft Search

By Christine Hall on November 20, 2014 |

Browsers, Business and Internet

There have been rumblings for some time now about Google’s search contract with Mozilla coming to an end this year. For ten years, the search giant has been the default go-to when it comes to search on Firefox, a deal which has supplied more than 80 percent of the browser’s funding. There’s been talk that Google or Mozilla wasn’t interested in renewing the deal, either because Firefox competes directly with Google’s Chrome browser or because the folks at Mozilla are unhappy with Google’s open web policies, depending on who’s doing the talking.

Firefox brings "click to play" to browser plugins.A week ago, in an attempt to make up for this projected loss of revenue, Mozilla began displaying advertising tiles in new tab pages on Firefox in newer versions of the browser. The first two sponsors, according to a Mozilla blog post, are CVS Health and Booking.com. Then yesterday, in another blog post, the organization announced that it’s signed a five year deal with Yahoo to make the once uber popular, still somewhat popular web portal the default for searches in Firefox.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingFirefox to Default to Yahoo’s Microsoft Search
Dwight Merriman Part III: Vendor Lock, Forks & Desktop FOSSMongoDB Dwight Merriman ATO

Dwight Merriman Part III: Vendor Lock, Forks & Desktop FOSS

By Christine Hall on November 17, 2014 |

Business, Copyright and Software

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of a three part series focusing on an interview with Dwight Merriman, co-founder of MongoDB. Part one was published last Monday as From DoubleClick to Database. Part two was published on Wednesday as Why MongoDB Embraces Open Source.

MongoDB’s Dwight Merriman and I were about thirty minutes into our conversation at All Things Open. Lunch time was approaching and I was definitely hungry. Merriman was getting a little antsy, ready to wrap it up, but there were a few more things I wanted to talk about first.

MongoDB Dwight Merriman ATO
MongoDB co-founder Dwight Merriman giving his keynote address at this year’s ATO conference.
Click to enlarge
“You said something today in your keynote address that I’d never thought about and it resonated with me,” I said. “A lot of our readers are users of open source, but not necessarily developers, not necessarily involved in the business end of open source. They run Linux. They maybe have a website or two — something along those lines.

“You mentioned how much easier it is putting together a project with open source because you can take from here and there. You talked about modularity. I’m thinking that’s not a lot different than the Linux home user who’s using modules and just doesn’t think of it in that way. He’s got his operating system, he’s got his word processor, he’s got his spreadsheet program…”

There really wasn’t a question here, just an idea to throw out for comment.

Christine Hall

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingDwight Merriman Part III: Vendor Lock, Forks & Desktop FOSS
Microsoft: GPL or GTFOMicrosoft logo

Microsoft: GPL or GTFO

By Larry Cafiero on November 14, 2014 |

Business, Copyright and Software

One of the issues this week that has had the FOSS press all atwitter — literally and figuratively — and has had a lot of smart FOSS people uncharacteristically swooning is the fact that Microsoft is “open sourcing” .NET and other software (For example, .NET is released under the MIT license, whatever that may be).

One subtext here, of course, regarding the misplaced euphoria by some begs the question, “Is Microsoft trustworthy?” The answer is clearly, “No. Absolutely not.” Despite the fact that Redmond has been playing nice with FOSS lately, we should not trust Microsoft any farther than former CEO and Stasi agent look-alike Steve Ballmer can throw a chair.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingMicrosoft: GPL or GTFO
Groupon & GNOME: Doing the Right Thing

Groupon & GNOME: Doing the Right Thing

By Larry Cafiero on November 12, 2014 |

Business, Desktops, News and Operating Systems

First things first: I’m not heavily invested in GNOME. In fact, once GNOME 3 came out and — gasp! — no icons on the desktop, I said “vaya con dios” and made skid marks racing to Xfce, KDE and Openbox (on the CrunchBang box) on various machines in the lab. The reason is a matter of personal taste. For the most part, I like icons on my desktop, not in a tray on the side, and I like what they do when I click on them — like, you know, open programs.

But this is not to say I haven’t used GNOME lately. In a test drive on Sunday of Fedora 21 Workstation (that’s GNOME, for those of you keeping score at home), I was reminded why GNOME was not my personal favorite. Exhibit A: I have a tendency to amass large numbers of different copied material to which I often return from time to time — not a huge deal with Klipper in KDE or Clipman in Xfce. But in the current GNOME 3-point-whatever, the clipboard is being managed way behind the scenes, and that doesn’t work for me.

gnome-logoLet me be clear, for those GNOMEistas who might just have their proverbial knickers in a bunch: GNOME has been a remarkable FOSS citizen providing a better-than-adequate desktop environment for many FOSS users, perhaps even a majority of FOSS users. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Further, I will say this for GNOME: Unity should be more like GNOME. Compliment? You decide.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingGroupon & GNOME: Doing the Right Thing
The Wide World of Canonical

The Wide World of Canonical

By Larry Cafiero on October 31, 2014 |

Business, Distros and Operating Systems

Last week, I wrote an item that mentioned that the original Ars Technica article on 10 years of Ubuntu, since rightfully edited to delete the number of countries under the sphere of Ubuntu’s influence, briefly reflected the following irksome claim:

“Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. Those users span 240 countries…”

Numbers: They may not be Canonical’s strongest suit.

I don’t blame Ars Technica for originally posting it because it’s a common claim by our friends from the Isle of Man. Also, I give Ars Technica all the credit in the world for going back and fixing it. But for the last week, it bothered me that Canonical might continue to make such a claim, knowing full well that they had erred.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingThe Wide World of Canonical
Latest Articles