When it comes to Open Source software, forking is a feature! Anil Dash said it well: There are several related technical concepts that can answer to the name “fork”, but the one I reference here is the dramatic moment when a software project undergoes a schism on ideological or technical grounds. Instead of merely taking their ball and going home, those who forked were taking a copy of your ball and going to a new playground....
This question has me pondering the broader values behind open source: openness to inspection, openness to revision and improvement, working together in a commons, not in a doctrinaire centralized system but rather in an informally organized (if at all), decentralized coming together based upon common interest. That’s not to say there aren’t rules. Scientific research has traditionally been open source. I recommend James Burke’s Connections for some wonderful perspectives on this subject....
Is the future really free? It seems we’ve entered an age where there’s a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren’t investing out of philanthropy. There’s value there. YouTube is “free” but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why? Here’s a hint: It’s not about the Tube. Chris Anderson’s Wired article was quite bold in its proclamations:...
When it comes to post-mortem publicity rights, this decision is BIG: The Southern District of New York has just issued a bombshell decision in this area. In Shaw Family Archives v. Marilyn Monroe LLC, it held that Marilyn Monroe’s heirs cannot claim post-mortem publicity rights because she died before the enactment of the statute that creates them in California (and, for reasons that are not important here, Indiana). So, according to this Court, her image, likeness and persona are all in the public domain....
The story goes like this: A couple hundred years ago, Scottish chemist Joseph Black was approached by some Scotch distillers. With the explosion of coal power, they wanted to know exactly what techniques they should use to replace their wood-burning distilling processes with coal-fired methods. Black did some experimentation and developed for them the appropriate method. But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black’s ideas of “latent heat” and used them in the development of a new steam engine....