A Little Nookie. October 2011:Its been almost a year since I picked up a Nook Color, and from the beginning the temptation has been there: "I'm not just an eReader, I'm a tablet. Root me, ROM me, and I'll show you a good time." This week I finally gave in to temptation, and installed the ever-popular Cyanogen Mod. After two days of flirtation and fun, I'm back on the straight and narrow with my stock Nook Color. But I've learned some interesting lessons along the way. Read more.
The HPCC Covenant. October 2011: Bruce Perens has announced an innovative new approach to open source project governance and intellectual property, an approach to be used by LexisNexis for their data analytics engine, HPCC. Perens, author of "The Debian Social Contract", which ultimately served as the foundation for the Open Source Definition, has always been an innovative thinker when it comes to community management, governance, and open source. The problem he purports to solve with LexisNexis' newly announced "Covenant" has to do with a perceived asymmetry in dual-licensed software. While I applaud Perens for a genuinely useful innovation, there are some other perspectives to keep in mind when examining corporate-community partnerships around open source projects. Read more.
Sisyphus and Warcraft. January 26, 2011: One of the surprise gaming hits of 2010 was Minecraft. In some ways its an astonishingly low tech game, with minimal resource management, no victory conditions, no quests. You get some blocks. And you build something with them. Anything. This work is time consuming and tedious. Minecraft, after all, is not a multi-million dollar production rivaling a Hollywood film in terms of scope, cost, and resources. So why are people so obsessed with Minecraft? To understand this, you have to understand what is so deeply wrong with Minecraft's antithesis, World of Warcraft. Read more.
Cloud Computing in Plain English. August 2010: "Cloud Computing" is the latest Internet buzzword. Typical of over-hyped concepts, it is both important and misunderstood. I've had to explain this confusing idea to non-technical people so many times that I finally decided to just write it all down. My hope is that your next "cloud" encounter with your significant other, mom, or pointy-haired boss can be handled by saying, "Here, just read this." Read more.
The Three Camps of Open Source. October 2009: Matt Asay has a typically thought-provoking post up titled Free software is dead. Long live open source. While I like much of what Matt has to say, and I like all of what he forces us to think about, I want to remind folks of the full historical context at work here. Read more.