Mark Cuban on Grokster

March 31, 2005 Leave a comment

As I mentioned in the most recent LinuxQuestions.org Podcast, Mark Cuban is helping Grokster in their legal defense against MGM. Grokster losing this case really has the potential to stifle innovation (the case centers around whether a company is responsible if a technology they come up with is used to do something illegal – in this case copyright infringement). It's a bit silly when you actually think about it. Gun makers aren't (usually) sued in gun related deaths and in the technology arena we have the betamax precedent. Seems some large media companies and associations are just lashing out in any direction they can. If they put as much effort into creating better products and keeping up with new technologies, they'd have nothing to worry about. Mark Cuban recently did a short interview with GELF and he's absolutely correct – “software doesn't steal content, people steal content”. There was also recently an interview with EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. The EFF will be representing Grokster in the case. Lastly, you can read what Mark had to say on the topic.
–jeremy

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MySQL Grows Up

March 30, 2005 Leave a comment

While it's great to see maturing, one has to hope that they don't forget where they came from or why they are so popular. It's fantastic that they are adding stored procedures, triggers, views and ACID features to MySQL ('fixing 10 years of criticism in one release', according to one of the co-founders). Fantastic, that is, only if they can retain what has made MySQL so wildly popular – easy to install, a breeze to maintain and optimize and lightning fast. Each MySQL release I've used (3.22->3.23->4.0->4.1) has been better in almost every regard than the previous version and I'm anxious to check out 5.0 – I just hope MySQL hasn't lost what made it great in order to become “enterprise-ready”.
–jeremy

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How Progeny Survived the Dot-com Crash

March 29, 2005 Leave a comment

An interesting article about how was able to weather the dot-com crash and turn into a profitable company. Some words of wisdom from Ian Murdock, who was a major reason that Progeny was able to stay afloat.
–jeremy

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Yahoo! 360° Followup

March 29, 2005 Leave a comment

I've had a little more time to play with since this post. I covered some of the things they did right in that post (Ability to add custom RSS feeds “coming soon”, ability to blog and share reviews, decent integration with other Yahoo! bits and Flickr integration, music sharing) and I also really like the grainularity in which you can control what others see. Overall I think they did a good job. Here's by feedback, FWIW. It seems they are going after the average, not necessarily technically savvy, Yahoo! user (of which there are about 30 million or so). From what I can tell, they are offering a bit too much for the average user but not enough for the savvy user though. I think they are in danger of being in that middle ground that tends to not be overly useful in the web space. As such, I can't see any main stream bloggers moving to the platform – and as I said I don't think this was Yahoo!'s intent. I'd also like to see more integration on non-Yahoo! bits (think Skype, gaim, even technorati) and the ability to customize things more in general. As it is, unless you are a heavy user of Yahoo! services, 360 is only going to be mildly useful IMHO. Lastly, we've yet to see any of the “social networking” sites take off – even Google's orkut has been fairly stagnant as of late. I think many of the issues that plague the space haven't necessarily been solved here. All that being said, Yahoo! seems to really be listening to users feedback on this one and the thing is beta. Overall I think it has a lot of potential. Nice start Yahoo! – I hope you follow through and continue to improve this. Good luck.
–jeremy

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Yahoo! 360°

March 29, 2005 Leave a comment

Thanks to Jeremy I have a Yahoo! 360° Beta account. Don't have a ton of time this second, but I'll take a better poke around in a bit. Looks nice after a cursory glance though. Ability to add custom RSS feeds “coming soon”, ability to blog and share reviews, decent integration with other Yahoo! bits and I'm quite sure Flickr integration is on the way. You can even share music. So far so good. Looks like the Yahoo! vs. Google battle is heating up.
–jeremy

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LQ ISO update

March 28, 2005 Leave a comment

LQ ISO is now smart enough to know what country you are visiting from and show you mirrors in your country before all others. Of course you still have the ability to choose from the full mirror list, but this feature should make finding a close download mirror that much easier. Over 600,000 downloads have already been facilitated by LQ ISO. 1,000,000 downloads – here we come!
–jeremy

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I'll be on the Linux Link Tech Show Tonight II

March 24, 2005 1 Comment

In case you weren't able to listen to the Linux Link Tech Show last night, I've posted an OGG of the show. Hopefully you'll find the segment I was in interesting ;) I come in just about 38 minutes into the show.
–jeremy

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I'll be on the Linux Link Tech Show Tonight

March 23, 2005 1 Comment

Looks like I'll be on The Linux Link Tech Show tonight. The show starts at 8:30 EST. Tune in!
–jeremy

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A GPL Win in Michigan – DrewTech v. SAE

March 22, 2005 Leave a comment

I was extremely excited when I read the above headline…and then I read the article. It's great to see that the attorney thinks that the “SAE surrendered to the GPL” and I'm certainly glad that the side representing the the GPL came out on top, but the reality is (or so it seems to me) that this was a settlement, not a judge ruling on the case. I'd hesitate to call that a legal win as to my knowledge you can't use someone settling as precedent. The GPL surely will have it's day in court and I'm confident in its ability to stand up to litigious lawyers, but I'd hesitate to call this that day. Remember though, I am not a lawyer – I don't even play one on TV. I could very well be missing something. If I am, let me know.
–jeremy

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Danese Cooper: reflections of an open source diva

March 21, 2005 Leave a comment

A great article from Danese Cooper, who was an Open Source evangelist at Sun and will soon be going to Intel. This article is a good look inside Sun and it shows that some people there really truly do get it. The article touches on Open Sourcing Java and also states that Sun contacted Linus before the whole OpenSolaris thing, which I didn't know. As always, Linus answers in a way that you've come to expect (and that I really respect and appreciate).
–jeremy

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