I spent Thursday evening in Nashua, New Hampshire listening to a presentation at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group (MerriLUG) by Eric Eldred, a Director at Creative Commons and plaintif in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision rendered by the Supreme Court. Eric has a very low-key, well thought-out and persuasive presentation on the use of the Creative Commons license (the license used for this blog as well as millions of others). Great presentation! Based on discussions at that meeting, I’ll likely be dropping the “-nc” portion of the license. Paraphrasing what Eric said, “if you can figure out a way to make a million dollars off what I wrote, go to it!”
Friday morning involved a long scenic drive north through Franconia Notch to meet with hostmaster Jason Kern of KernBuilt and confer with a potential new client on an interesting social software application. Jason and I lunched at Miller’s Cafe and Bakery in Littleton, NH.
Accompanying me north via the wonders of podcasts was Doc Searls interviewing Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun MicroSystems, at the Syndicate 2005 conference. Jonathan had a slew of interesting insights and statistics. Sun has apparently woken from their slumbers of the late nineties, completely revised their product line, “Open Sourced” their OS (devil’s in the details, I’ll need to dig into this one a bit – what license, what terms, etc.) and are offering some pretty interesting machines – very low power, very high performance. Two great tidbits: who’s the number one camera manufacturer? What’s Google’s number two expense (People’s number one)? Very entertaining; made the trip go swiftly.