Search

While I was handing out candy on Halloween, a trick-or-treater came to the door dressed as an open-source project. There was code everywhere and volunteer contributors were coming out of his ears. It was a clever costume, but what made it really scary was the giant fork he was carrying. Open-sourc...

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, started a revolution over printer drivers. According to the official history, he couldn't get permission or source code to modify a printer driver to suit his needs, so he wrote the General Public License (GPL) and a compiler. Eventually,...

I love life and I love having choices. I guess you can say I am pro-life and pro-choice. Unfortunately, for most people those labels represent the opposing sides of a very divisive issue. The curious thing is that these terms are not really descriptive of the issue at all. In fact, unless you know...

France built the Maginot Line in the 1930s, a supposedly impenetrable state-of-the-art defense system to protect the country from her long time enemy, Germany. It was meant to prevent a German invasion, but the Germans simply went around it, dealing the French a humiliating defeat in the spring of ...

We can learn some lessons from reality TV. For instance, many disputes can be settled without lawyers. If your brother-in-law owes you money or your neighbor's tree drops fruit in your pool, you can simply vote them off the island. Or fire them. Either way, working it out on your own is a cheaper al...

Connoisseurs of 1960s TV might be familiar with Paladin, a Western that featured a San Francisco character with a business card that read "Have Gun, Will Travel." He was a dapper cross between a private detective and a bounty hunter who roamed through the West tracking down bad guys. He was mainly a...

The news is out: SCO is losing money. Fast. Considering that SCO has no revenue and lots of expenses, the news is not surprising. Raising revenue and cutting expenses might help, but neither will be easy. The company reported a significant net loss in the third quarter, which it blamed mostly on a l...

With a flair for the dramatic even Shakespeare might appreciate, commentator Larry Seltzer recently predicted that Sender ID -- a spam-filter technology some call the "king of the e-mail security mountain" -- would soon be history. "It's a tragedy," Seltzer wrote. "Microsoft's uncompromising licensi...

Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...

Lawyers and programmers have a lot in common. Programmers write code and lawyers write legal documents. Both consider the issues, generate written work product, check it for bugs and then release the product. Both professions rely on libraries to avoid reinventing each aspect of the product. There a...

Sometime around 5,000 years ago, Chinese merchants learned to spread their cargo over several ships so that if one were lost, they would not lose their entire shipment. It was the birth of what we now call the insurance industry. Before too long, the concept spread. Phoenician ship owners on the hoo...

It's nice to know someone is reading my column. According to some of your letters, it seems my recent column on the GPL touched a nerve. To my critics who referred to me by names other than Phil, I can only respond with an equally mature "Same to you!" For those who prefer a more reasoned discussion...

In Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, the United States Supreme Court ruled that patents could be granted for "anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man." That includes software. Law practice tip: If you need to argue in court that software is not patentable, point out that Chakrabarty does not a...

There is a line Jack Kerouac used to describe the independent, nonconformist nature of the Beat movement during the 1950s. He said, "Imagine explaining to 10,000 raving Tokyo snake dancers in the street that you are looking for peace but you won't join the parade." That may not be exactly the explan...

Last week, I examined the nuances of a marketplace for licenses, and its relationship to a parallel marketplace for products that use those licenses. This time, for those readers who might actually be in the market for a license, let's review the one that gets the most ink -- the General Public Lice...

When J.S.G. Boggs needs money, he draws it. He draws one side of a banknote on high-quality paper, actual size, and presents it to the merchant. The merchant, knowing that the banknote is not official, can accept it or ask for real cash. If the merchant accepts it, Boggs writes the details of the tr...

Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying, "You know what my toughest competitor is? It's pirated software.... If you really look around, you'll find way more pirated Windows than you'll find open-source software. Way more." Gates couldn't be more wrong. At least in China, his tough stance against pi...

There is a classic scene in the movie "Casablanca" where Claude Raines attempts to close down Rick's Cafe. When Humphrey Bogart demands to know why, Raines says, "I'm shocked! Shocked to think that gambling is going on in this establishment!" Meanwhile, the casino employee walks up and hands him his...

Everyone is talking about open source, even presenters at BIO 2004, the international biotechnology conference recently held in San Francisco. As the argument goes, if open-source software can be developed in centralized communities of interested parties less expensively than proprietary software, c...

Sun recently announced it would open-source its Solaris operating system. While declining to get specific about timetables and the type of open-source license the company plans to use, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software group, promised that Sun will "be very aggressive and pro...