Nice post about the relative security of startups and non-startups, and how often you’re going to fail as a manager, particularly in a startup. Scary post about the ethics (or lack thereof) in business school. Pretty clear correlation between that and the gigantic mess at the top of our corporations (like HP.)
September, 2006
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The FSF got some things wrong in this process as well. (But I had dinner in between posts.) The FSF has failed to convince people that patents are a threat. The FSF folks apparently believe (1) that patents are a threat to free software projects and (2) that patents are immoral. These are distinct issues.…
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I just posted about what the kernel guys really want. They are saying some other non-substantive things, but most of these are either solvable or just plain wrong. Virtually everything they are saying about license proliferation is wrong, except for the obvious statement that license proliferation is bad. We’re all agreed on that. GPL v3…
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The kernel guys just put out a doc about their feelings on GPL v3. It is really a remarkable document, if for no other reason than that 30-ish kernel developers actually agreed on something :) My thoughts on it are that they are saying some very substantive things, but that they are dodging the real…
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I can’t exactly say I knew him well (hardly at all) but the other Luis in a lot of my CS classes at Duke, Luis von Ahn, won a MacArthur genius grant. He’s the dude who co-invented the captcha and more recently the predecessor to Google’s Image Game. Very cool for him, and nice for…
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Some GNOME-y things that are impressing or exciting me today: Fernando Herrera (of bug-buddy and other fame) is coming to Boston Summit. Rock. So should everyone else, of course. (I’ll be there for drinks and dinner :) The Build Brigade has reached a significant milestone, with the integration of jhbuild and buildbot. Combined with the…
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[Reposted from First Movers. Law and other fields are beginning to see what free software/open source has seen for a while, as more and more skilled people move to the web and begin to give away their knowledge, displacing established (read: knowledge hoarding) institutions along the way. Clay's post, linked within, made me write about…
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There have been quite a few followups to my voting post. A couple of the most common themes: Why do we need electronic voting anyway? It is inherently insecure. I think a lot of people, first off, tend to forget how insecure and exploitable paper ballots are- Chicago, Mexico City, and lots of other places…
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Some bits before I head out for the weekend: Microsoft’s new media player is going to allow sharing of files wirelessly with your friends. Of course, to make it RIAA-safe, they’ll wrap it in their own DRM when it leaves the device- regardless of the copyright status of the file. It is sort of Grokster…
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In the past year, Red Hat has gotten deeply involved in two projects- mugshot and OLPC- that get them outside their comfort zone (enterprise Unix-y operating systems) and into new territory. Here is my free advice on the next outside-the-enterprise-box project they should take on- one that would make the world a better place, keep…