The Zero Room

Haven't blogged here for a while, so I thought I should mention for the record that I think this is a development of world-shaking importance, in order to in future gloat about how precient I am.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.  This conclusions of this report are highly supportive of open standards, lukewarm but generally approving of free and open source software, and quite keen on "open innovation", which might be more informatively labelled "free data" (projects such as Wikipedia and open courseware projects are cited).

It is heartening to see that even an organisation representing the biggest of big business recognises that "Digital Intellectual Property" is a "Special Problem", to paraphrase an earlier report.

A German IBM executive has let it slip that IBM will not be upgrading it's desktop systems to Windows™ Vista when it ships. They will be upgrading to GNU/Linux instead.

And in a ComputerWorld poll, over half of respondants (at the time of writing) claimed they would be doing likewise.

Gervase Markham, licensing guru for the Mozilla Foundation, recently received a startling email from a local government department in the UK.  This department had recently discovered people selling copies of Mozilla Firefox, and gave the Foundation a courtesy call before calling in the cops.

The explanation that Mozilla not only permits but encourages people to redistribute their software, even for money, shook one poor bureaucrat's world to it's foundations.

"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to," she spluttered.  Extraordinarily, she even complained that giving your customers the freedom to do this "makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation."

Hello, allow me to introduce you to the twenty-first century - I don't believe you've met.