solvitur ambulando
GPL, LGPL, BSD, Apache, and friends.
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. I'll admit to cringing a bit when I started watching, but I'm pretty happy with how it all went. Here are the slides. In the panel afterward, someone asked my why open source … Continue reading My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
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.
Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to make unprecedented security protections available to public. The National Security Agency has a mission. It is not just the nation's code keeper and code breaker, but it must ensure the security of the … Continue reading The NSA’s Security Challenge
Using open source software, the US Navy was able to standardize the shipboard systems on its new destroyers, reducing the complexity of the ship's systems and their reliance on proprietary real-time software. Wall Street now uses this same technology to execute orders predictably, without relying on vendor-specific hardware and software. Every ship in the Navy … Continue reading The Navy’s Standardization Problem
If this is the future of computing as a whole, why should U.S. health IT be an exception? Indeed, given the scientific and ethical complexities of medicine, it is hard to think of any other realm where a commitment to transparency and collaboration in information technology is more appropriate. And, in fact, the largest and … Continue reading Washington Monthly on Open Source in Healthcare
For a number of reasons, I'm fascinated by the fight over the <video> tag in HTML5 as related by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica – and not just because I like the idea of not having to install a plugin to watch video online. On the technical side, it's mind-boggling to think about the possible … Continue reading Patents, Video, and an Open Internet
Open standards are motherhood and apple pie – they ensure a level playing field in which many implementations can compete against each other, keep the barrier to participation low for newcomers, will outlive any given company, and ensure that systems can communicate with each other with a minimum of fuss. In other words, open standards … Continue reading Open Source and Open Standards
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.-- Scott Stark
a technology job is no excuse 