In big interoperability news, Microsoft and Novell have entered into a deal to work together. Those are some interesting bedfellows. Much to unpack and understand. One insight, from ArsTechnica’s report: “From Microsoft’s standpoint, virtualization is a good thing, especially when Windows is the host operating system. A close linkage between Microsoft and Novell reinforces Microsoft’s … Read more
The digital copyright issue is one of the sidebars related to the Google/YouTube transaction that has merited a fair amount of digital ink. (For a few examples: don’t miss Fred von Lohmann as interviewed by John Battelle. Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache have an extensive piece highlighting the continuing uncertainty in the digital copyright space … Read more
Microsoft has just unveiled a new commitment not to assert certain rights against people who develop code based on specifications that Microsoft has developed. It’s called the Open Specification Promise. Warning: the announcement itself, at the top of the page, is written in legalese, though probably pretty readable legalese. The FAQs make things a lot … Read more
Lawrence Lessig is giving a rousing lecture right now to a standing-room-only crowd in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School. It’s a plenary session of Wikimania 2006. He is in his element. It’s amazing to feel the energy in this room — unconveyable by blog or any other Internet-borne medium, but very very real. Interoperability, … Read more
So, true confessions: it took me a while, even with Dave and other true believers as fellows at the Berkman Center and us hosting the RSS 2.0 spec, to “get” RSS and why it was going to be (and now, already is) so powerful. I’ve been going through the same slightly slow process to “get” … Read more
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is making history by considering a policy that would ensure the long-term integrity of our data. The importance of this process cannot be overstated. The implications of a policy that supports the development and implementation of open standards, if done right, would have substantial positive implications over the long run, here … Read more
There’s trouble brewing in the DRM world, as many of the big DRM offerings for music and other forms of digital content are not, on various levels, interoperable with one another. The Coral Consortium is making a CE DRM play, along one axis, to combine the efforts of several leading providers and to offer an … Read more