Category Archives: Postings

The Legislative Disconnect Of The Meshed Society

What is the “meshed society”? It is people, joined together by the Internet, able to interact — to collaborate, to create, to transact and to relate directly with each other — without the need for another person to mediate or authorise. As we discover more and more ways to disintermediate our interactions, society is transformed: from a series of hubs with privileged interconnecting spokes intermediating supply to consumers at their tips, into a constantly shifting meshed “adhocracy” of temporary connections, transactions and relationships of varying length. In the adhocracy, individuals play the roles of user, repurposer, maker, buyer, investor and collaborator in a constantly changing spectrum of combinations.  Continue reading →

Article 13 – An Existential Threat

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a letter from more than 70 leaders in the emerging meshed society (including me) which criticises Article 13 of the European Union’s proposed new copyright regulations. This Article starts from the assumption that the only role of an individual is to consume copyrighted works and hence deduces that any act of publication on the part of an individual must be infringing the copyrights of a corporation unless proven otherwise. The text doesn’t state things that clearly, but the effect is unmistakable. It’s as if a politician was proposing to ban syringes because addicts use them, without considering that hospitals do too.  Continue reading →

One Last Push To Save The API

A group of computer experts – including me – asked a US court to think again about fair use of APIs this month.

Tomás Saraceno artworks at SF MOMA: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities

It was an unlucky fact that Oracle’s case against Google over Android started with patents. Their initial case fell apart almost immediately, with almost all the patent claims invalidated. The implausable backstop copyright case Oracle made against Android’s use of language-essential definitions in the Java APIs (and thus against the freedom of developers everywhere) carried on though. The initial patent case meant that the appeal when Oracle soundly lost ended up at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) — the specialist patent appeals court in the USA — and not at a court competent to dispense copyright justice.  Continue reading →

FLOSS Weekly 488: Keycloak

Simon co-hosted this week’s show, which looked at a very interesting identity management system called Keycloak that puts commercial-strength federated authentication, authorisation and identity management within the reach of every developer. It’s written in Java, backed by Red Hat and has a large and active community.

 

 

FLOSS Weekly 484: The Lounge

After the Pidgin show a while back, Simon stepped in at 11:59 for Randal again, hosting an interesting show about a pure community project that makes a web-hosted IRC client called The Lounge. If you need a web client where you can maintain ongoing IRC sessions, this open source, self-hosted alternative to IRCCloud and others may be the answer. It’s written in Javascript, runs in Node and there’s a ready-to-use Docker container available.

FLOSS Weekly 481: Chomper

Simon actually went to the Petaluma, CA studio to co-host FLOSS Weekly 481, along with an audience of winners from the most recent Bolzano Hackathon. The project interviewed was Chomper, a proxy server that lets you whitelist and blacklist web sites with the intent of avoiding distractions for your work.

FLOSS Weekly 479: Pidgin

This week Simon co-hosted episode 479, an entertaining interview about the Pidgin project, one of the most important Open Source Free software projects. It’s a multi-platform program that allows pretty much any instant messaging system to be used from a single interface. It also includes libpurple, a library that can be used in other software to do the same thing, and Finch, a terminal-based IM app with all the same capabilities.

Amazingly, Pidgin is developed by a tiny group of part-time developers. Maybe it’s time for the Open Source community to step in and help to guarantee the future of this important, widely-used app and library? A donation might be a start but they seem to need more…

FLOSS Weekly 476: VIPERBuilder

In a last-minute change, Simon stepped in to host FLOSS Weekly 476 interviewing the Etsy VIPERBuilder project with Jonathan Bennett. That’s an iOS tool to help developers use the VIPER architecture to build apps. VIPER is an alternative to MVC.

Simon mentioned (or should have mentioned):

Unknown Others

Open Source is for you, yes. But it’s also for unknown others.

A cow pulls a lawnmower on the Rajpath in New Delhi

Being close to an open source project, it’s easy to imagine that everyone sees the project the way you and your fellow community members do. This especially applies to the corporate sponsors of a single-company project; anticipating use by competitors they often want to apply controls to who can use the code.  Continue reading →

FLOSS Weekly 471: ScanCode

Simon was co-host of FLOSS Weekly 471, which featured the ScanCode Toolkit. ScanCode analyses a source package and lists what licenses are found in it. The toolkit can be used as part of a larger solution and together with the new AboutCode Manager provides open source compliance staff with an easy way to know what licenses they are actually dealing with.

Simon mentioned: