rants.org

I just sent this letter to New Scientist magazine; no idea if they’ll print it or not, so I’m posting it here too, as several people have recently expressed interest in this idea:
James Love’s proposal for cash prizes to replace today’s patent monopolies (“Fair prices, fair profit”, page 24, Nov. 10-16 New Scientist Special Issue) [...]

Rather than duplicate what I’ve written elsewhere, I’ll just point to it:
http://www.questioncopyright.org/open_government_data_principles
‘Nuff said.

This Friday I attended a productive and unexpectedly fascinating workshop at UC Berkeley, aimed at developing a model policy for archives that host images — often disturbing and graphic ones — from war zones and other areas of violent conflict. In particular, the Iraq war is generating a lot of such footage (it’s the first war in which [...]

As promised, my chapter from O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code book is now online under a free license:
Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology

Of course, no chapter on programming would be complete without tree diagrams…

Since all the authors’ fees are being donated to Amnesty International, an unexpected result of writing a chapter for this book is that I [...]

I don’t normally do “What’s Karl been up to lately?” posts, feeling that people would probably rather read short articles on specific topics. But the last three weeks have been unusually busy and interesting, and they have kept me from posting anything at all. So now I’m writing a post just to say what [...]

A student named Augusto Pedroza posted a comment here recently, a comment containing such a large and complex question that I’ve decided to use this separate blog entry to answer it.
Augusto is a Google Summer of Code student, meaning he’s working in an open source software project this summer. He says that as he [...]

I’m a big fan of Google’s Summer of Code program — it’s brought a lot of new developers to the Subversion project, and this also seems to be true for many other open source projects.
Summer of Code encourages college students to participate in open source projects over the summer, by funding both the student (for the [...]

No doubt this was just an accidental slip by a photo caption editor on autopilot, but still it’s disheartening to see the New York Times broadcast Administration talking points so unthinkingly.
This photograph on page A9 of yesterday’s New York Times shows a lone demonstrator (apparently one who supports the Administration’s policies) standing across from a [...]

Microsoft recently claimed that open source code (in particular the Linux kernel) violates 235 of Microsoft’s patents. It’s not clear they actually intend to sue anyone for infringement, it may instead be some kind of bizarre publicity ploy. But there’s a great quote from Microsoft’s licensing chief, Horacio Gutierrez:
This is not a case [...]

[Blogcheck alert, blogcheck alert!]
So what’s the blogiquette take on writing a post that’s essentially a link to another post somewhere else? I just read a great piece by Ben Collins-Sussman over at iBanjo, about the difference between hacker and non-hacker cultures — using banjos and guitars as the case study! Check it out.