Archive for June, 2008
June 27, 2008 at 12:39 pm
· Filed under open source, smartphones, telecoms
Interesting news the other day. Nokia announced that it has offered to purchase the 52% of Symbian that it doesn’t already own and that the deal has been favourably received by the other shareholders. It promptly then announced plans to make Symbian open source. You can find details here and here.
But for me the most interesting aspect of this development is the particular license Nokia’s creation, the Symbian Foundation, has chosen. Instead of the ever popular GPL 2.0 or fledgling GPL 3.0, the decision has been made to release the source code under the Eclipse Public License.
I’d love to know why. What does Eclipse have the GPL doesn’t have? Or visa versa? I have queries to numerous sources outstanding on this topic and will report back as soon as somebody comes up with a plausible explanation. What this space.
Permalink
June 23, 2008 at 1:50 pm
· Filed under Firefox, browsers, open source
I’ve been using Firefox 3 right through the beta programme – in fact ever since it was included in Ubuntu with the release of Heron. I love it so I’m not surprised that more than 8 million copies of it were downloaded in a 24-hour period last week. And now there’s an excellent review of the new browser from the Financial Times (of London). Fortunately for those of us outside the immediate catchment area, Duncan McLeod has posted it on his blog here.
Permalink
June 11, 2008 at 8:14 am
· Filed under Microsoft, ODF, standards
At the beginning of the month I blogged about appeals lodged with ISO over its ratification of Microsoft’s crippled file format, OOXML. At the time, South Africa, Brazil and then India had all appealed the decision. Well now, it seems that Venezuela also lodged an appeal before the deadline passed.
I’ve just stumbled over a piece posted to ZDNet the day after my blog that offers a fairly comprehensive analysis of where the process is at present. Unfortunately, it’s beginning to look like ISO is going to pass the buck (pun intended) in perpetuity. The article ends thus:
“We maintain that the process is open and transparent,” said [Jonathan] Buck [director of communications for IEC]. “We do have specific directives under Joint Technical Committee 1 and at no time were processes not followed.”
The whole process is looks about as free and fair as the Zimbabwe elections.
Permalink
June 9, 2008 at 10:08 am
· Filed under Telkom, telecoms
The Times is running a piece this morning by Stuff editor, Toby Shapshak, which sums up rather eloquently the damage Poison Ivy has done to South African telecommunications and the broader economy by her actions and, in most cases, inaction. This passage is particularly poignant:
Now, all the warnings have turned into the mess that analysts, commentators and vocal journalists predicted. Ivy screwed us all.
It’s worth a read.
Permalink
June 8, 2008 at 11:01 am
· Filed under Facebook
Duncan, over at FM Tech brought an excellent piece by “John” on commentary.co.za to my attention. The subject is Facebook Humanism. The intro goes like this:
I dislike insipid and vacuous attempts at ‘caring’ at the best of times, but it’s becoming depressingly apparent that the internet has resulted in a new breed of insincere sincerity: Facebook humanism.
It’s one of the reasons I went to all the trouble of checking out of Hotel California, as the process has been dubbed. (To leave Facebook you have to fill in this form – there’s a group explaining the process here.)
Sadly, commentary.co.za doesn’t allow me to like to a particular piece so I’ve posted the full text below the line. You can find the full post here. Thanks to Darren for supplying the link that I couldn’t see on commentary.co.za.
Permalink
June 1, 2008 at 3:25 pm
· Filed under Microsoft, ODF, standards
The good news started flowing last week when I received an embargoed (at the time) press release informing me that the South African Bureau of Standards has objected to Microsoft’s gerrymandering of the ISO approval process by lodging an appeal. Ok. It doesn’t say it in those words but that’s my interpretation
That was on 28 May 2008. Tectonic reported two days later, last Friday, that Brazil had entered the fray by lodging its appeal and then on Saturday (31 May) that India had also weighed in. So, at the time of writing, three leading developing nations had objected to the ratification of Microsoft’s OOXML format via ISO’s fast-track process, alleging the due process was not followed – or words to that effect. All three appeals have been received by ISO so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Watch this space.
UPDATE: Mark Shuttleworth was a guest on the weekly ZA Tech show and had some interesting things to say about this and other tech-related issues. Check it out here.
Permalink
