Archive | 2003

The Chief Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, responds to the numerous requests FSF has received for comment on the SCO-IBM lawsuit. The short, sweet summary: “SCO, knock it off.” Slashdot responds here with the usual assortment of punditry and flames (link set to a score threshold of 4 for better S/N).

Patenting unique ideas for exclusive licensed use is an abomination to the software culture I was raised in. Good ideas should be shared, enhanced, amplified and refined. The *expression* of those ideas should certainly be copyrightable, to preserve, for a limited time, the rights of workers to protect their hard work from cut-and-paste. But, if I come up with a clever idea, say, of letting a customer order from my web site with a single click, well, that might be my competitive advantage for the week or month or year until my competitors can figure out how to duplicate my work, by which time I better have come up with a whole lot more clever refinements. That’s the nature of competition.

Also, I don’t believe that the patenting process fits well with the intellectual, rather than concrete physical, nature of the process.

Finally, if a patent is to be used, as is the rule within the mechanical community, the innovation must be shown to be sufficiently unique, and not just a clever extension of previous work. I don’t think we yet have the cataloguing, nor the examiners the in-depth knowledge, to make that determination.

From Slashdot: pdajames writes “An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren’t even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind.”

Rick Strahl, VFP guru extrodinaire and recently named C# MVP (congrats, Rick!), has a section of his white papers site devoted to “Industry Commentary” with some great perspectives on what’s happening.

250,000 people had signed up by 10:30 AM, and 370,000 by noon, meaning 1000 sign-ups per minute. It was a lead story on several news networks this morning. I tried to log on to do it, and got “Document contained no data.” Perhaps it hasn’t crashed, but it’s not surprising that the site is laboring under the load. From the main FTC site: “Due to high registration volume, you may experience slow response time.” Who doesn’t want to opt out, after all?

Try: http://donotcall.gov or http://www.ftc.gov

The .gov site reports 635,000 by 2:30 PM and 735,000 by 5 PM. Trying to post at 6 PM, I get the site, but it times out reponding to my submission. I note the site is an ASPX extension. I wonder how many more registrations they could have had if they’d chosen a more scalable technology.

I logged in and registered Saturday morning at 7 AM without a hitch.

The New York Times has a story here.

Reclaiming the Public Domain. The Washington Post is the first to cover Congressman Doolittle and Congresswoman Lofgren’s support of the Public Domain Enhancement Act.… [Lessig News]

I spent last night explaining, in 30 seconds or less, RSS and blogging and XML and VFP consumption of RSS and news aggregators and RSS production – whew! – and I’m pleased to see the discussion heat up again here (in the blogosphere) again today. Here’s a sample of the links I’m trying to keep up with:

Fixing RSS’s public-relations problem. Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: “But I don’t have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out.” Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999.
… [Jon’s Radio]

Post IDs.

FWIW, in RSS 2.0, I thought there should be a core-level post ID element, but I thought there was a pretty good chance, based on experience with the Blogger API, that each tool would have a different way of expressing it.

The compelling app for post ID’s is backup and restore. If I’m using RSS to back up a weblog, and if I need to do a restore, the post ID’s must be preserved, or when I regenerate the site after a restore, permalinks will break. Also since Radio and Manila are programming environments, developers may have created applications that depend on post ID’s being preserved. The same is true of many other blogging tools.

Rather than put this in the core, I decided to put it in a namespace, specifically for Radio, and to revisit the issue after other blogging tools started using RSS 2.0 seriously.

[Scripting News]

The lizard brain of RSS.

Simon Willison is helping a friend get an RSS feed together for her weblog, and had some questions and had to guess because there is no FAQ. Of the three decisions he made, I strongly agree with two of them. Now for the third — should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that’s what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else.

First, link has the easier name because it predates guid by three years, and its design is central to the initial design of RSS, to model items with three bits of data, title, link and description. Look at a News.Com story as the prototype for early, lizard-brain-level RSS. Every story they produce has all three items. My.Netscape presented each “channel” in a box, with TLD’s. Now when weblogs started using RSS, almost immediately, not every post would have all three, in fact since Frontier was the main weblog tool at the time, and didn’t support the common weblog-post model so familiar today, you might say that no weblog posts supported this model. It wasn’t until Blogger came along in mid 1999 that TLDs were possible in weblogs. It wasn’t until mid-Y2K that Manila supported TLD-type posts.

Anyway, I’m explaining all this background for a purpose, to say that, imho, link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context. I believe that was a very solid application and shouldn’t be muddied. Of course many feeds these days take link seriously, like for example all 68 of the BBC feeds announced yesterday.

Now that said, Radio uses link the way Simon uses it. But then guid didn’t exist when Radio shipped. Now that it does exist, I really feel strongly that people should use it, and let link be pure.

See also: Guids are not just for geeks anymore.

See also: RSS2-Support mail list.

[Scripting News]

BusinessWeek features a set of articles on what Web Services are, how they work,and predicts their possible success. Link via CapeBlog and Webservices.org.

Apple harvest yields computers, OS. The company says its new G5 machines are faster than any Windows-based PC on the market, but some are questioning that claim. Also: Putting a price on Panther, Apple’s new operating system. [CNET News.com]