Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Ed Roberts, designer of the first commercially successful personal computer, died yesterday in Georgia at the age of 68. Roberts founded the MITS company in 1970 and in 1975 developed the first personal computer, the Altair 8800. Soon Bill Gates and Paul Allen came calling, and later sold their first commercial software to Roberts. The [...]
Because of some recent skepticism about the economic viability of open-source software (and because of an upcoming presentation I’m giving on the topic), I’m calling on the TLF readership to give me some examples of companies—from big-name brands to small design shops—that are making money through creating or contributing to open-source software projects. I’m not [...]
Reihan Salam of National Review Online has a great piece on the US Trade Representative’s Special 301 Watchlist today. Salam points out that this list, which is supposed to identify nations that are a threat to intellectual property, may include Brazil, India, and Indonesia not because of any piracy occurring there, but because of their [...]
Mike Kirkwood of ReadWriteWeb recently wrote a piece asking the question “Will One Company Become the Dominant Player in Cloud Computing?” Kirkwood offered a series of arguments both for and against the idea of the market being one where a “natural monopoly” might occur and a few of his arguments are worth exploring in greater [...]
Mashable has reported that “The Internet” has made the list of Nobel Peace Prize nominees this year. This prize has already had its fair share of controversial and sometimes even comical nominees and recipients, but this sort of nomination is disappointing in a whole different way—it ignores the fact that individual human beings actually invented [...]
Google’s policy blog just announced that Google, along with several other companies around the world, has been subjected to Chinese-sponsored cyber attacks. As a result, Google will stop censoring the search results on Google.cn and as a consequence, may close its Chinese offices. This decision is refreshing. Despite over two decades of easing restriction on [...]
Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s Chief Information Officer, may want to turn his attention to the The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which begins its public hearings tomorrow. Here’s a screen shot of the Commission’s website as of 11:02am EST today: I also grabbed a copy of the PDF-only Notice of Open Meeting, as the site, [...]
Thanks to Jim for providing a great analysis of Jonathan Rosenberg’s “The Meaning of Open” from Google’s Policy Blog. I wanted to throw in my two cents without derailing the comments on Jim’s post. I hope you’ll this new thread of discussion interesting. While I enjoyed reading Rosenberg’s post and found myself nodding in agreement [...]
My colleague Jerry Brito and I are attending the annual meeting of the State Policy Network in Asheville, NC. In the process, we’ve heard a lot of things said about open-source software that we don’t agree with, and some things that are just plain wrong. The reasons for this are obvious. There are a lot [...]
The imagination of the open source community never ceases to amaze me. But these days the sheer number of people using open source solutions makes the previous statement akin to saying “people never to cease to amaze me,” which they don’t. However, with thousands of a developers adapting open platforms to problem I never knew [...]
May 22, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
