As a law student doing my thesis on open-source licensing (PDF), it was nearly impossible to find any substantive legal papers on the topic. In fact, the only one I can remember is Ira Heffan's excellent "Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age" from Stanford Law Review in 1997.
It's about time.
The journal is peer-reviewed by an editorial committee made up of members of the European Legal Network which, despite its name, actually includes legal experts from all over the globe. A few of the better-known names include Andrew Katz, Amanda Brock (Canonical), Mark Webbink (former general counsel at Red Hat), and Lawrence Rosen (noted author and author of the Open Source License). The journal will be released biannually.
As companies like Qualcomm seek lawyers with deep open-source expertise, journals like the IFOSSLR are critical to elevating the depth and breadth of open-source analysis, moving it well beyond the intellectual battleground of opposing ideologues.
The first issue is now available online. As Glyn Moody notes, despite the legal nature of the journal, its contents are genuinely interesting--fascinating at times--and relevant to anyone in the business or development of open-source software.
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I read an intriguing article in The Atlantic over the weekend, discussing the probable implosion to The New York Times and what its future may be. One paragraph, in particular, struck me:
At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it, the Times as we know it, will no longer exist...What would a post-print Times look like?
Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow the Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it.
In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters--now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases--could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting in with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world, unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.
This is a similar prognostication to what I offered up recently, one that I find increasingly compelling.
Ironically, my very presence here on CNET may confirm it. CNET's Blog Network is filled with non-CNET employees, like me. We offer CNET breadth, allowing CNET's staff reporters to offer depth in particular areas of interest (e.g., Stephen Shankland focuses on Google and Yahoo, as well as search, online advertising, portals, and digital photography). That depth will then be picked up by other publications to feed its breadth, while they choose to go deep in other areas.
Symbiotic, interesting, and effective. So long as the depth is strong, people will pay for access to that content, be it through subscriptions (I am and hope to always be a paid subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, as there's little more comforting than reading it on my couch at the end of a day), advertisements, or some other means.
Such a strategy enables the media to be many things to many people without having to undergo the burden of failing to be all things to all people. I think it's a winner.
Browsing through Dan Farber's review of a recent Pew Research Center survey on news readership, I was reminded of one of the central tenets of blogging: blogging helps to destroy the business models powering its original source material:
While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets.
I've long recognized this, and have taken my share of swipes at a new web mentality that celebrates aggregating largely amateur content, without providing the financial incentives to replace such content with professional content. But what to do about it?
Looking at my own readership patterns, I tend to read the front and back of magazines and newspapers. That is, I read the headlines (much of which derive from original research and authorship on the part of that publication) and the op-ed page. Everything else tends to be minor filler, "Associated Press" content that doesn't motivate me to purchase.
Is the new model for media to discard the AP and focus on original content?
I don't mean the model that The New York Times has taken, focusing on a publication that is almost entirely of its own making, nor the experiments that The Wall Street Journal is making.
Rather, I mean making media heavier in two core areas: the big stories that no one else can do better than a given publication, and the commentary on the big stories and everything else, because the commentary on the little stories arguably makes them much more interesting.
And so, TechCrunch thrives because its founder, Michael Arrington, is an industry player that has conversations with technology's movers and shakers that others get less often, if at all. I'd wager that people read The New York Times as much for its columnists as for its slant on the news. Ditto for The Wall Street Journal. I read Businessweek starting at the back, plowing through commentary and then usually giving up once I get to the "news."
Less filler, more killer: is this the new model?
If I'm not alone in how and what I read, then the answer to media's woes is to stop pretending to be all things to all people, and instead to significantly up investment in a limited but potent brew of original news reporting, focused in areas in which one's staff has competitive differentiation, as well as the best commentary for this and everything else.
Goldman Sachs recently surveyed enterprises and found 20 percent plan to support the iPhone, and Apple's Macs are among the biggest share gainers among computer manufacturers in the enterprise.
On Thursday, however, I saw the clearest sign yet that Apple wants a bite out of the enterprise: a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal. While some vendors like Cisco are looking for growth in emerging markets like the Middle East, Apple's biggest emerging market may well be the Fortune 500:
Apple gets serious about enterprise marketing
(Credit: Apple/Wall Street Journal)I apologize for the quality of the image, and that I wasn't able to get the entire page into the scanner. It was a full-page ad, after all.
I never liked the Fake Steve Jobs blog because I didn't like an author to be able to hide behind anonymity. When Dan Lyons, the then-Forbes and now Newsweek reporter, revealed his identity as Fake Steve Jobs and decided to continue blogging as Real Dan Lyons, I cheered. I know Dan and respect the reporting he's done over the years, even when it hasn't been favorable to open source.
Why? Because I can always count on Dan to tell the truth, as he sees it. Dan pulls no punches.
This past week, that tendency toward brutal candor caught up with him, as The Guardian reports. Dan lashed out at Yahoo! for lying to reporters like him and at The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher for conceit, only to have both blog posts removed. (I caught the Yahoo! post in my RSS reader before it disappeared. You can find it here.)
The Guardian seems to think such censorship is a necessary evil:
...[I]t must be tough for Dan Lyons. He could say more or less what he liked as Fake Steve because it was satirical (many a true word spoken in jest, as they say), and that brought him a big audience. He can't say the same sort of things as Real Dan and a Newsweek employee, so he doesn't have a big audience. And there certainly isn't enough money in blogging for him to give up the day job.
Are we happy about this? That Dan may have "bailed on blogging" due to pressure from Newsweek? I know I'm not.
Dan stepped over the line, perhaps, but I still prefer it to the watered-down non-news that most media publications shovel out. And, closer to home, Newsweek is talking out of both sides of its mouth in censoring Dan's blog. On one side, it apparently forced Dan to remove the posts. On the other, it headlines his blog in this way:
(Credit:
Newsweek)
So, which Dan Lyons does Newsweek actually want? The answer is most likely "both," but it seems to believe it can have both without the occasional bout of squeamishness. It's not going to happen.
The people who read Dan's work in Newsweek are generally not going to be the same people that read his Real Dan Lyons blog: grit in the latter does not affect his credibility in the former for 99 percent of the population.
That "grit" is sorely lacking in most reporting, which pretends to take a safe, neutral, and distant view on everything from Yahoo!'s change in executive leadership to child-rearing tips, perhaps afraid of the hovering specter of a lawsuit. Well, I for one am glad that Dan takes risks, even when I don't agree with him, and even when I think he steps over the line. Bring back the blog, Dan. We need the raw commentary.
Valleywag is dead (or, at least, diminished), as CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. About time. I used to like Valleywag, but then it started trying to drive page views by breaking "news" about the sex trade in Silicon Valley, trying to foment controversy around Peter Thiel's personal life, and so on.
When it broke news, even scandalous news, it was good. When it didn't, well, it wasn't.
Contrast that with TechCrunch. TechCrunch routinely breaks real news. It covers startups that matter (and many that don't). It has become an hourly read for me, as it offers content that I don't easily find elsewhere.
Is it unique in this? No. CNET breaks a lot of technology news and has done some interesting work with blogs (pats himself on the back), plus it remains a must-visit product reviews site. Nobody does general business news better than The Wall Street Journal. The Register? It provides a great deal of exceptional content with a fantastic, biting tone.
Valleywag? Increasing snide, decreasing substance. Owen Thomas did much better work while he was at Business 2.0. I like his writing. I just think he had to pander to the wrong elements at Valleywag. Hopefully we'll get the best of Valleywag (and Thomas) as it's folded into Gawker.
The Wall Street Journal has announced its 2008 Technology Innovation Awards. Among the heavyweights on the list - Salesforce, Applied Materials, GlaxoSmithKline, etc. - is open-source storage vendor, Cleversafe, a company that I've long followed and admired.
It's great to see Cleversafe getting its due credit, especially from a list of judges that includes the CTO of Agilent, EVP of Software at SAP, and more distinguished names.
Here's what caught the judges' eyes:
[Cleversafe's] Dispersed Storage software breaks files up into slices and then sends the slices over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a network. By themselves, the slices are unreadable to hackers or anyone else not authorized to read them, but the original file can be easily reassembled, even if not all the slices are available due to equipment failure or natural disaster. The software also promises to be less expensive than traditional storage methods, which rely on creating full, multiple copies to protect against loss.
Jane Royston, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and an Innovation Awards judge, says the software "could be an important part of Internet data storage systems."
What a great testament to Cleversafe's continued progress and product excellence.
Some time ago I discovered that I didn't like reading "the news" very much. Perhaps this resulted from reading too many British newspapers, which don't try very hard to disguise their angle on a story. Some are pro-monarchy, some are pro-business, some are pro-Left, some are pro-Right. You choose the paper that matches your bias.
In the United States, we still pretend to be unbiased. I'm not sure why. I'll occasionally get comments on this blog accusing me of bias in favor of Apple, against Microsoft, or whatever. Of course they're right. I make no attempt to hide it. I find blogs refreshing precisely because, as a general rule, they make no attempt to mask bias. This is what I want: Transparency, not some purportedly clinical examination of "news." I don't believe the latter is possible.
Take a look to the right. CNET clearly displays my bias, as it does for all of its outside bloggers. See the disclosure link? Now go to one of CNET's writers and bloggers' pages, that of Ian Fried, in this case: No disclosure page.
Not that CNET is alone in this. Head over to Tom Yager's blog at InfoWorld. No disclosure. Steve Gillmor over at eWeek? Nada.
Presumably this is because these writers aren't biased? That they have miraculously managed to live on this planet for a few decades as a tabula rosa, writing the world as it sees itself? Let me pause while I snicker into my sleeve.
We don't read these excellent writers because they lack bias. We read them precisely because of their biases. It's the commentary that makes "news" interesting, and that commentary is always heavily flavored by bias.
... Read moreThings have been quiet from MySQL over the past month or so, but today's Wall Street Journal has an awesome interview with Sun's Marten Mickos, perhaps the most quotable technology executive on the planet.
I really like how he talks through community (how to provide incentives, what to expect in terms of contributions), as well as competition. On the latter front, Marten talks through the value of leading through innovation:
MYSQL chief Marten Mickos isn't afraid his rivals in the database-software industry will ever overtake him. "Let them try," he says. "Our secret is in the way we operate our culture, and I'm convinced others cannot imitate that."...
Even if someone studied us in tiny detail, I don't think they could really match us. We've shown them our code, and nobody has been able to measure up against what we have....Even if I showed you my DNA, you wouldn't know how to become me.
Ah, Marten. I missed you! Head to the article for much more. What a great person to have in the open-source ecosystem.
The influential Walt Mossberg has entered into the browser fray and declared a winner: Mozilla's Firefox:
My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.
If you are a regular reader of the Journal, you know that Mossberg can be pretty tough on products. He's an Apple fan but tends to give Microsoft its due, as well. His choice of Firefox is impressive because he also tends to focus on the average consumer, i.e., someone that isn't likely to go out and download software, but rather will take whatever is given to them.
So the big question is how will John and the Mozilla crew get Firefox into more consumers' hands so that they can benefit from the best browser available?
