After the high drama of the last couple of weeks in the smartphone arena, it’s refreshing to encounter some good old-fashioned low comedy. We’ll get to more serious fare, but let’s take a look first at how astonishingly Microsoft just screwed the pooch. Microsoft’s very first update to WP7, adding no features but intended “to… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Bricks and Battiness
Tag: open-source
The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop
An excellent article on the future of smartphones puts hard numbers to a trend I’ve been watching for two years. In so doing, it points out one of the fundamental competitive drivers in the smartphone market. More than that, it displays a powerful if sometimes less than obvious advantage of open-source software, and implicitly relates… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop
NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
In discussion of the GPSD project, a commenter suggested that its role might be going away in part because the NMEA 0183 protocol historically used in GPS sensors is being replaced by NMEA2000. So far, this is not true, and the reasons it’s not true are worth a look because they illustrate a sort of… Continue reading NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
Off with their header files!
I released a new software tool today. The surprise about this one is that it turns out to be consistently more useful than I expected. And thereby hangs a tale.
It’s good to be ubiquitous
So, while trying to discover the minor version of the Android 2.2 running on my G-2, I touched the tab labeled “Open source licenses”. Scrolled down, and “Eric S. Raymond” popped out at me.
Software licenses as conversation
An article published yesterday, I could license you to use this software, but then I’d have to kill you calls out some odd outliers in the open-source licensing space – odder, actually, than any I ever reviewed when I was the founding president of the Open Source Initiative. I wonder, though, if the author actually… Continue reading Software licenses as conversation
My open-source project is cooler than yours
Yes, GPSD is way cooler than your project. You know how I can tell? Because my latest feature request is from a scientist who wants to use GPSD as part of the control software for an autonomous robot submarine. That’s how I can tell. No word yet on whether the robot submarine will have a… Continue reading My open-source project is cooler than yours
You have ascended
Redoubtable hacker Chip Salzenberg wrote me last night with the subject line “You have ascended”. I quote in full: Long time no chat. Hope you are well. In fact, I don’t have to hope, because I just read this in a book: Raymond in his brilliant The Cathedral and the Bazaar [2001] … That’s all… Continue reading You have ascended