LA City Council Reads ACT’s “Paying for Free” Paper
OK, maybe nobody on the city council actually read Paying for Free, the paper where we describe the security, privacy and sustainability costs of "free" software. Still, on Monday the Los Angeles city council delayed its vote on a contract to replace the city's email system. with Google Apps. The reason: concerns over costs. Cloud-based software is often touted as an easy way to save money instead of using software installed locally on desktops and servers. Often, cloud-based software and [...]
The Meaning of Innovation—And What’s Coming Next
It’s a term that’s been thrown around a lot over the past couple of years, at times being more popular than at others. Now seems to be one of those times when “innovation” is the hot word—but what the heck does it even mean?I was at a Business of Innovation conference last week—there’s “innovation” right there in the title!—and defining “innovation” was a portion of several presentations. The dictionary says that innovation is simply “the introduction of something new.” But [...]
IDC study confirms importance of national policies for innovation
Back in 2007, ACT worked with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) to write a groundbreaking paper entitled National Policies as Platforms for Innovation: Reconciling a Flat World with Creative Cities. The paper pointed out that “innovation is the ‘secret sauce’ for the growth and prosperity of economies,” with “economists generally [viewing] innovation as the competitive driver for economic growth and high living standards. Countries that innovate will prosper; those that do not face a steady decline in productivity.” [...]
ICANN Goes Independent With New Accountability Mechanisms
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today took a critical step toward achieving real accountability and institutional confidence by agreeing to a new “affirmation of commitments” with the U.S. Department of Commerce. The decision is very much in line with the recommendations I made in a piece for the Center for American Progress's science journal, Science Progress, earlier this week. The expiration this month of ICANN’s previous “Joint Project Agreement” with the U.S. Government posed a serious [...]
A Strange Thing Happened on the Way to the Class Action Settlement…
The Google book search settlement seemed all but wrapped up in a bow, that is, until hundreds of objections were filed with the Court, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on September 10 examining the antitrust, privacy and copyright issues implicated by the deal, and then the Department of Justice filed a comment on September 18 urging the Court to reject the settlement. In my opinion, the Court simply couldn't ignore the significant concerns raised about the deal and wouldn't approve [...]
A discussion about Apple’s choice of licenses used in open-sourcing Grand Central Dispatch
Caution: because I am talking about code libraries, this discussion will be technical - a combination of the worst of geek and lawyer-speak. Sorry.I had a discussion with a colleague yesterday about Apple’s choice of licenses used for open-sourcing of its Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) concurrency framework, which is a piece of software Apple credits with driving great Mac OS X performance improvements. GCD comprises both a library component, called “libdispatch”, licensed under Apache 2.0, and a C language extension, [...]