Glyn Moody's blog

Choice: it's one of the key ideas at the heart of free software.  The right to choose how to use your software, the right to choose who you share it with.  Who could be against choice?  Certainly not the Initiative for Software Choice, except that it has a slightly different view of what choice implies:

To encourage continued software innovation and promote broad choice, governments are encouraged to consider the following neutral principles:

Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences

Promote broad availability of government funded research

Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards

Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections more>>

Following Nicholas Petreley's discussion of the GNU GPLv3 debate from one angle, I'd like to look at it from another - that of the cultures of the two groups involved - and what this implies for the future. more>>

I've been tracking the evolution of Microsoft FUD for nearly 10 years now, and wrote a short history of the subject a few months back.  But even I was impressed when I came across Microsoft's latest effort in this department: it's truly a masterpiece of its kind. more>>

If you look at the font of all wisdom - no, I don't mean Wikipedia, but Amazon - you will find stacks of books with titles like The Corporate Blogging Book, Blogging for Business, Blog Marketing and the rest.  Whatever the title, the basic message is the same: if you're in business, you've got to be blogging.  Because if you aren't, you're not "having the conversation" with your customers, which means, in turn, that you're not getting your message out or valuable comments back. more>>

In many ways, an open source project is just like a business. 

It's a long-standing joke in the free software world that this will be the year when we see GNU/Linux make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. What's really funny is that all the key GNU/Linux desktop apps are already being widely deployed, but not in the way that people have long assumed. more>>

It's well known that Google runs its vast array of servers using a custom version of GNU/Linux. But this is only one aspect of its support for free software. Others include its Summer of Code, now well established as an incubator of both coding talent and projects, and more recently its open source code repository, which offers a useful alternative to Sourceforge.net. Similarly, in porting Picasa to GNU/Linux, Google has made contributions to Wine, while open source projects in Sri Lanka have been the beneficiaries of more direct help, to the tune of $25,000. more>>

After the dotcom doldrums of the past five years, there is a new wind blowing through the world of commercial software. It's open source, but not as we know it. The first-generation start-ups like LinuxCare, TurboLinux and even Red Hat, were essentially service companies. Today, an increasingly-favored approach is to employ dual licensing to create two revenue streams: one based on providing services for free software and the other through traditional commercial licenses to products that are generally based on the free software version. more>>

When I interviewed Richard Stallman back in 1999, he had some interesting thoughts on the subject of freedom: more>>

I'm going to keep working on the free software movement, because I don't see who's going to replace me, and I don't see how I could do something more important in some other area. The issues of freedom that everybody's heard of are much more important than this - freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free assembly. The reason I'm not more involved with them is that I don't know what to do about them very effectively.