The World of a Penguin

Are you sitting on some data and not sharing it? Is it collected by tax-funding? Why do you not share it? Tim Berners-Lee talk at TED about the problem people not sharing data. Take 15 minutes and listen to his talk. I wait when you doing it............ OK? Are you still sitting on your data? Have you talked to you boss about share it? Show the talk for him/her. Think! Help mankind! Actually, Tim Berners-Lee talks about the semantic web but not using the word.

France will allow the OpenStreetMap project to access their national data with all roads, names, etc. I assume this is a part of the EU Inspire directive . When will Sweden follow?

In the February issue of Communication of the ACM there is an article about a site for peer reviewing Patents. The site is caller Peer to Patent . The idea with the site is to give the sites community a chance to point out prior art and other relevant information about new patent applications. To get the details about the process the site has an instruction video and tutorial. Behind the site stands New York Law School. I thinkthe idea of the site is very good and it will hopefully increase the quality of granted patents. I guess the inspiration to the community is partly is from the Open Source community.

It will be an exciting week in front of us. On Monday the European Union will decide in the antitrust charges against Microsoft. As all of you may know, SCO filed for Chapter 11 this Friday, so on Tuseday there will be a hearing to decide if SCO will get bankruptcy protection or not. These decisions will affect the Open Source community. I guess that the decisions can not hurt the community, just gain it. The question is how much?

Is Disneys Mickey Mouse violating intellectual properties of the Scandinavian vikings? Take a look at the picture in this article . Isn't that Mickey Mouse? It was found outside Lund in south of Sweden and is from the eight century. Let's sue Disney for violating the intellectual properties of Scandinavian heritage.

Yesterday evening my wife and I visited a talk by Richard M Stallman at the university here in Linköping. He is currently doing a tour in Sweden. He had a talk with over 1000 visitors in Gothenburg on Wednesday and in Linköping were it close to 300 people. They had to close the doors fifteen minutes before the talk started. He will today talk at the Swedish green party's congress in Norrköping. The picture is when I am buying a pin from RMS. It was the first time I listened to a talk by Stallman live. He is a classic politic agitator, no slides. He just stands and talks absorbed about his subject copyright and free information. The title of the talk was "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". He started with the history of copyright. Then he entered into discuss the problems with currently done changes in copyright laws and introduction of DMCA. The talk was interesting, but he is some times to much fundamentalist and mark words. Like, if you say Digi...

and now has it happened. I am of course talking about the big discussion subject in the FOSS-world today, the CNN-article about Microsofts attack on Free and Open Source Software. I am not worried at all. I hope instead that this will kill software patents and proprietary software. Unfortunately, a lot of managers will be afraid of open source. Personally, I would be more afraid doing business with a company that base its existence on layers and lock in methods. The last two weeks, I have been working with a commercial content management system. Don't ask me why, I wondering this my self. It has not been a pleasant drive. Not at all, not a single minute. It is complex to configure. There are tons of errors in the documentation. They say you should use maven , but they don't do it in their example site. They jump around with different versions of jBoss, tomcat and other J2EE-environments. (Tomcat is not a J2EE-environment, but anyway are some examples based on it.) I am glad I...