Odds and Ends

Filling the digital landfills of our lives

Clay Shirky believes we're biased both to share and to like sharing digital information. Given the rate at which we create, share, and then discard digital goods, he may be right. The problem is that we're now wading through digital debris, and there may be hard costs associated with our wastefulness.

No, I'm not talking about Nick Carr's "Google makes us stupid" argument, though I think he raises a host of valid points.

Rather, I'm talking about the hard and soft costs associated with massive "landfills" of digital information which never … Read more

'Cloud' vs. 'source' in the battle of bland corporate names

The technology industry has many virtues. creativity in naming is not always one of them.

Some of the industry's biggest brands are also the blandest. "Microsoft" is just "microcomputer" and "software" squished together. Intel? "INTegrated ELectronics."

And even when we do come up with somewhat creative names, like Google, they're a mistake.

So perhaps it's not surprising that two of the biggest trends in computing--open-source software and cloud computing--have been accompanied by some of the most staid company naming conventions ever.

For open source, it became de rigueur to … Read more

The open-source world goes skiing

The name is a fortunate accident, but the fun of skiing with a group of open-source business executives is no accident at all.

The Open Source Goat Rodeo 2010 took place in Utah, February 4 through 6, and included great skiing, wonderful food, and exceptional people--including the first ever appearance by former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.

As I do every year, I've created a video to highlight the activities and give a taste for the event. It's not a closed event: I hope you'll join us in 2011.

I probably should identify everyone by the color of … Read more

Can open source be consumer friendly?

Technology that requires a manual is technology that doesn't get used. At least, where mainstream users are concerned in the consumer and enterprise software markets. One of the lessons of the last 30 years of computing, and particularly in the rise of the consumer Web, is that ease-of-use trumps deep functionality most of the time.

That's what made Microsoft the billion-dollar behemoth that it is. It's what is driving Apple's iPhone into millions of consumers' hands. And it's what makes Facebook, Google, and other Web companies so successful.

They're easy. They're intuitive. They … Read more

Facebook is the new Compuserve

Want to know what prominent Apache Software Foundation and former Google developer Greg Stein thinks about MySQL, the GPL, and the European Commission's antitrust stance on Oracle/Sun? You've got two options.

You can read his original post here, of course. But if you want better commentary, you'll need to read this same post on Facebook.

Except that you probably can't, unless you're Stein's "friend" on Facebook.

Open Web, meet your closed cousin, Facebook.

People rightly fret about Facebook's twisting, turning approach to privacy, but perhaps a far greater concern is … Read more

Theory of competition fails in open source, elsewhere

The natural state of a market doesn't appear to be broad competition between Lilliputian-sized competitors. Rather, markets tend to crystallize around a few dominant players.

Ironically, this is as true of open source as it is of proprietary software.

In September I asked if open source can monopolize a market. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn and others gave great feedback, but the market since then has provided the best evidence:

Yes, we can have an open-source monopoly (at least, a natural monopoly). In fact, this may actually be the normal state of a healthy open-source market.

If we think of … Read more

R.I.P., open-source evangelism

We have reached a critical inflection point for open source.

With everyone from Qualcomm to UBS to Microsoft embracing open source in one shape or another, the question is no longer "why" to use open source, but rather "how."

Because of this changing mindset around open-source adoption, we no longer need evangelists encouraging open-source adoption. Adoption is a given. It's the default.

No, what we need now are those that can illustrate how to derive the most benefit from the inevitable adoption of open source.

This is perhaps evident in MindTouch's just-released survey of … Read more

Cabbie's tweet reunites lost BlackBerry with owner

Some believe that Twitter has the power to change big events like Iranian elections. I think that its strength may be in much smaller, but still significant, ways.

In fact, I was the matchmaker recently between a Barcelona cabbie and an American employee of a pharmaceutical company. Well, a matchmaker between the cabbie and this lady's BlackBerry, anyway.

It happened like this:

I have a Twitter search in TweetDeck that alerts me every time the word "Asay" is used on Twitter. (I need to be able to track down libel somehow!)

On August 30, I saw this tweet:… Read more

Strange symbiosis among Apple, Microsoft, and open source

For all the rancor between opposing technology camps--Microsoft vs. the open-source community, Apple vs. Microsoft, etc.--there's a lot more symbiosis going on than meets the eye. In fact, it's hard to imagine Apple without Microsoft, open source without Microsoft, and so on, as Harry McCracken suggests in MacWorld (not online at time of writing).

PC users...have long benefited hugely from the existence of Macs. Microsoft and PC manufacturers have cribbed so many of Apple's good ideas that it's tough to imagine what Windows machines would look like today if the Mac had never existed.… Read more