Open Source headlines from the Open Government plans
The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, …
Open source matters to open government. Really.
“Open source and open government are not the same,” I’ve been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open …
Sunlight Week: accountability for earmarks
Earmarks are a notorious vehicle for pork, in part because they lay nestled inside opaque legislative prose. In the FY2010 budget, WashingtonWatch’s …
Goodbye Google Reader
So I finally decided that Google had more than enough information about what I liked and disliked, that the laggy Google Reader …
Developers for Glory
Although it may be simple to conflate the Apps for Democracy and Apps for America contests with the exciting new Apps for …
Failing Faster: Lessons from the Open Source Community
[I first presented this at the GTC Southwest conference in Austin on February 13, 2010.] Hundreds of thousands of open source software …
What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The …
What you need to know about the 2009 DOD OSS Memo
In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Defense CIO released a memo on the use of open source software in the DOD. The …
Read My Ramblings About CONNECT
Here’s a really nice writeup on the CONNECT Code-a-thon at iHealthBeat. They quote me a lot, which is what makes it really …
US Courts: Open Source Will Make You Break the Law
Most of you already know about the US Courts’ shameful profiteering through the PACER system. They charge $0.08/page for public court documents …
My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
The good people at O’Reilly have posted my Open Source in Government talk at OSCON 2009 on blip.tv. It’s also on YouTube. …
Open Source on the Battlefield
In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.
Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.
The NSA’s Security Challenge
Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to …
The Navy’s Standardization Problem
Using open source software, the US Navy was able to standardize the shipboard systems on its new destroyers, reducing the complexity of …
Washington Monthly on Open Source in Healthcare
If this is the future of computing as a whole, why should U.S. health IT be an exception? Indeed, given the scientific …
Patents, Video, and an Open Internet
For a number of reasons, I’m fascinated by the fight over the <video> tag in HTML5 as related by Ryan Paul of …
Open Source and Open Standards
Open standards are motherhood and apple pie – they ensure a level playing field in which many implementations can compete against each …
Your Java + LGPL Java != LGPL Java
In case there’s still any confusion:
usage via importing or subclassing of classes in an lgpl jar DOES NOT create a derivative of the lgpl jar that requires the application/library using the lgpl jar to be released under the LGPL.