Open source is not seen as a political philosophy because the issues followed by those who understand it are seen as "geek" issues. (That’s Adam Smith to the right.) These are some of the issues I’m talking about: Copyright fairness Defining networking at the edges rather than at the center. Opening up more unlicensed spectrum […]
Everyone knows that blogs are open source journalism. The out-of-pocket cost for me to offer this to you is minimal. Its economic value to me is based on how many of you read it. Every blogger is a publisher as well as an editor, subject to both sets of ethics by the requirements of the […]
G. Pascal Zachary, after a multi-decade career with Big Media, has emerged confused. At John Dvorak’s Uncensored site he urges journalists to embrace their biases, and to state them up-front. He calls this "a new ethos of journalism." He thinks he’s saying something new. He’s not. He’s saying something quite old. Here is what he’s […]
This week I have many of the thoughts you have been reading here for a week, only in a condensed, early version. (I usually write my columns a week ahead of time.) Please consider subscribing to A-Clue.com. Subscribe here. Always free. When I first agreed to do an open source blog at ZDNet my beat […]
Last time we played The 1966 Game we identified Virginia Republican Senator George Allen as being analogous to Bobby Kennedy — the charismatic keeper of the true Reaganite flame. We left by asking who Nelson Rockefeller might be. Remember the ground rules. Rockefeller in 1966 was the leader of the moderate or "Dewey" wing of […]
Scaling the intimacy. This is where Howard Dean failed. His online campaign was unable to give new recruits the same intimate experience he was able to give them six months earlier. His technology platform was wrong. He needed, not a blog, but a Community Network Service. There are many such projects in the open source […]
Is it possible? Could Internet advocates really win the network neutrality fight? It’s still an uphill battle. But the Bell attempts to kill municipal networks on the state level were turned around, after early victories against a backdrop of no publicity. Could the same be happening here? Some news from the front: Bell advocate Mike […]
Welcome to the flip side of Moore’s Law, the problem of abundance. The problem of abundance hit the PC industry starting in the late 1990s. Too many Hertz, too much storage, what can we do with it all? For many years Microsoft seemed to have answers (bloatware! multimedia! movies!) but in this decade even Microsoft […]
The first direct threat to the telephony business model has emerged in England. There The Cloud, a hotspot network, has begun offering a $20/month (11.99 pounds in real money) all-you-can-eat calling plan that could compete directly against cellular. Of course, I hear you say, hotspots are stationery, while cellular is mobile. But the company is […]
We have a new medium here, one that needs principles to assure its liberty. These are political principles. Principles worth fighting for. Principles that are being undermined, systematically, by the Bell companies and the copyright industries, to the ever-lasting economic detriment of the United States of America.
