I’m celebrating the end of my portion of my trial by … spending all weekend in meetings, specifically the OSI’s annual face-to-face board meeting, which we’re holding this year in Chicago. It’s been a very productive meeting so far, with lots of good discussion about both our vision and our plan for attacking the future. [...]
Please login first to post comments.
In the past, I’ve been known to say that skeptical things about the Open Source Initiative’s role in the open source world – usually arguing that OSI was doing the basics (license approval, open source definition) respectably, but also had a lot of potential that wasn’t being taken advantage of. I’m excited to announce that [...]
After the release of MPL 2, the first request for MPL 2.1 came from someone who didn’t want to put copyright headers in individual files. The issue has recently reared its head in Apache as well, and I recently was asked related questions by a GPL user as well. The main reasons given for not [...]
I microblogged (diaspora, identica, twitter) the following statement a few weeks ago: First new year’s resolution, 10 days late: I will use ‘hereditary license’ any time I am tempted to say ‘viral license.’ Surprisingly, this generated quite a few responses (on identica and elsewhere)- some people liked it, but many people had their own alternative [...]
Based on my series of MPL posts for opensource.com, I’ve been nominated for a “people’s choice award” as a top contributor to opensource.com. It’s a nice little honor. That said, there are lots of folks on the list of nominees who have written and thought far more than I have this year- so you should [...]
This morning I hit publish on the announcement of MPL 2.0, finishing a two year process. The official announcement had a number of acknowledgements for the many people who helped out along the way, but I wanted to take to my personal blog to add a few personal notes. “thank you note for every language,” [...]
The best thing I did for myself in 2011 was to get back on a bicycle after not being on one for 15+ years, and after never actually being comfortable on one. I’m not going to be racing any time soon, but I now really look forward to a bike ride as part of the [...]
When I moved into San Francisco, I asked some folks about books I should read to get a sense of the history of the city. Here’s a sampling of the books that I’ve read since then, gathered in one place for the next time someone asks me the question. I’m still open to more suggestions, [...]
A few months ago I bought “Typography for Lawyers” (TFL), an excellent book that I would recommend to all lawyers. And since the biggest document I was working on at the timeis, of course, published in HTML, I started spending a few minutes here and there on learning enough CSS to make the license look [...]
I’m excited to say that (with Krissa’s support and approval) I donated today to the Ada Initiative’s Seed 100 Campaign. Free and open software and culture have been very good to me, and I’m glad that the Mary and Val (and hopefully soon a fleet of others) will be working to make it more accessible [...]
Over the past few years I’ve heard a few friends talk about plans to get off the internet for one day a weekend, one weekend a month, etc. Each of the past two years I’ve tried to take 3-4 days off the internet, and both times it has been rejuvenating- I come back feeling pretty [...]
As I’ve mentioned before, there are a lot of analogies between programming and legal work. I’m working on an upcoming post to explain a specific application of a legal concept. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those few concepts where there is not a ready programming analogy. I’d love for someone to prove me [...]
Saw this for the first time on my drive to work yesterday: Congrats to all my friends on a very solid release and on reinvigorating their important message of public service.
I’m still working, albeit sometimes slowly, on the new MPL. Two days ago we announced the release of Beta 2- you should go read it :) Besides the usual (small tweaks to some language in a further attempt to get it Just Right; improvements to the GPL language; etc.) I also published a bit of [...]
Just a note to say that I’ve been invited to join the W3C‘s Patents and Standards Interest Group as an Invited Expert. I’m pretty pleased by this and am looking forward to contributing immediately. Invited Experts speak for themselves, not other organizations, so I will not be representing Mozilla or anyone else, but hopefully I’ll [...]
A large company with a distribution network, and a little guy with something nifty to distribute walk into a bar… Step 18 / Rex Roof / CC BY 2.0 [NB: Nothing here is legal advice; just business advice. I do not represent either the GNOME Foundation or Canonical, and have not talked to either one [...]
Today was my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I’m leaving to work at the law firm of Greenberg, Traurig. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but I’m pretty sure that it is the right one, both for me and for Mozilla. Why? Mozilla has been terrific for [...]
So… I’m in the market for a way to read RSS feeds offline, with no keyboard; i.e., some sort of tablet or kindle-like device. Ideally it should be cheap and reliable (reliable in the sense that I can pick it up every morning while still groggy, take it to a concrete bunker with no wifi, [...]
Tim Lee is quite close to something very smart here, I think, and related to something I’ve been pondering for a while: why are so many open source software UIs typically bad? Tim’s primary answer, I think, not wrong: good design generally results from having a strong vision of what good design for a particular [...]
Because I know a fair number of QA-oriented people (for some reason) still read this blog, I thought it might be worth pointing out that you still have 24 hours to apply for the bugmaster position at Wikipedia. Sounds like a cool gig for the right person, in a growing organization.
I’m trying to find a book on the political history of multilingualism in the US; in other words, of why/when it started becoming acceptable (and in some cases required) for government works, electoral ballots, etc., to be written and printed in multiple languages. This is related to some of the talk about mozilla-as-social-movement that a [...]
High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well. So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff. I’ve been using dwdiff since [...]
I’ve been trying to get back to living my life in a task-centric manner, and Firefox Panorama, without necessarily being designed for those goals, is perfect for it. Someone else put the words in my mouth: when you’re trying to do task-centric computing, what you need is not just a place to dump tasks (a [...]
Diaspora came to lunch at Mozilla today. Some notes. They gave me a nice shoutout. ;) They’re doing pair-programming and test-driven development this summer, which I think is great. Sounds like they’re getting some great guidance from Pivotal Labs. Very explicitly trying to focus on things everyone can use, rather than something for geeks. Are [...]
In the same vein as my earlier commentaries on Google comes this piece by James Grimmelman. He doesn’t comment on the actual substance of the net neutrality announcement. Instead he focuses on process, and his description of how google does things seem so dead on to me into how google that I think I’ll be [...]
[This was originally published at autonomo.us- comments over there.] [Disclaimer: since my last post at autonomo.us, I have become an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I don't feel this has tainted my views, but feel free to weigh that information as part of your analysis of this article. Relatedly, I do not speak for that [...]
A few months ago I finished reading Eugene Bestor‘s ‘Backwoods Utopias‘, a book on the Utopian social-communitarian movements of the pre-Civil War US. Some belated notes on the book’s themes follow. The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember [...]
I’m preparing for my GUADEC keynote and have a request for material that would be useful. Specifically, does anyone have a good group picture from the first GUADEC? This is the best I’ve found so far, but I seem to recall there were better. Please comment or email me (luis at this domain) if you’ve [...]
Things I did to myself before the bar exam: Did only a fraction of the recommended practice essays. Generally felt drastically underprepared. Things that happened to me during the bar exam: Day before the exam, while studying poolside at the hotel: got a sunburn. First day of exam: stung by a bee. Last day of [...]
Some Third-Party Thoughts A friend summarized Bilski this way: “Shorter #Bilski: Federal Circuit, your rule was too straightforward and didn’t add enough uncertainty to an already volatile field.” I don’t think that was actually the court’s intent, but certainly that will be the short-term outcome. Long-term the court and the PTO will have to find [...]
Some very preliminary thoughts on Bilski, written in the course of one train-ride to work. This does not represent the viewpoint of my employer and should not be taken as legal advice; merely observations on one ruling. In the lower court (Federal Circuit) ruling on this case, the Federal Circuit was very aggressive in trying [...]
It is extremely satisfying when you can see your work turn directly into a working product. I just played with last night’s test version of firefox, and as per roc’s blog post, it indeed contains the video support whose licensing I (and others here) were working on last week. In an ideal world, lawyers should [...]
My boss has written a blog post that tries to bring together some recent data points from across the privacy spectrum; it is worth a read. I’ve been noting a few (much smaller, more trivial) things myself over the past few days that suggest to me that privacy concerns in general, but facebook-related privacy concerns [...]
While I was moving, and taking the bar exam, and getting married, and all the other stuff I did last year, it turns out I screwed up. People had sponsored me through GNOME’s adopt a hacker program, and I… well, I botched it- the postcards people had signed up for fell through the cracks.
No [...]
The joindiaspora guys, in a generally good response to my questions, conclude by asking:
[W]hat would be un-pragmatic about giving four excited dudes who spent their last semester of school thinking about a problem you are “worried-about-but-can’t-deal-with-now,” twenty bucks so they can take an honest crack at solving it? :)
Lots of people asked some variant on [...]
Hello Cambridge-based lazyweb! I am looking at network Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) for guest wifi networks, and I have been told that MIT’s AUP for their guest wifi network is particularly terrific- short, simple, etc. Can someone in Cambridge who happens to stumble by MIT check into the network and copy/paste the text and email [...]
So lots of friends were tweeting this morning about Diaspora, a project to raise funds to get a summer’s worth of hacking done on a distributed, Libre social network. A distributed, Libre social network would be a terrific thing to have; I’d love to support it. And I love the eager energy I’m seeing around [...]
I love leechblock. It really helps keep my life sane. I was working some with it this morning to tweak my settings, and it seemed like a good time to write about three features I’d kill for, even to the point of putting up money for them if there were a way to sponsor features [...]
I completely understand why many startups have terms of service with terrible content- providing terms of service whose content is fair to the user is incredibly risky and/or expensive (though it isn’t unheard of).
But there is just no excuse for terms of service with terrible organization, especially when you’re trying to sell services to real [...]
There are lots of sources of links these days- delicious, twitter, and blogs. Many of these are interesting, but not so interesting that I want to read them all the time. Currently I have to decide either to read or not read these people.
I’d like to add a third option: to have a ‘middle’ pool [...]
I’ve written a brief piece on the open source law community over at opensource.com. May be of interest for those hackers who wonder if they have any lawyer/guardian angels, and if so, do they ever talk to each other?
“We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate. It defines us as we [...]
More patent lessons- first on submarine patents (basics!) and then on how patent pools are licensed. I don’t really want to continue this series, but the past few days have been a good reminder that there is a lot of misinformation out there around patents.
To start with, OSNews wants to claim that there are no [...]
[Disclaimer: I'm not saying this on behalf of my employer, I have no exposure to MPEG-LA's licensing agreements, and I'm not making a broader claim about the h264/ogg debate; I just want to clarify one specific point of law.]
“If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, [...]
I’d love a thunderbird plugin (or really just a feature) that says “you were bcc’d on this email- are you sure you want to reply to all and accidentally disclose that you were bcc’d?”
(And yes, of course that means I did that today- pretty sure the first time in a very long career of email [...]
I can’t go to bed because Mairin is right on the internet and so I want to (1) say she’s awesome and (2) add two cents on mailing lists and using the power of a web interface to make them better. Bear with me; maybe this is completely off-base (probably I should just stick to [...]
Yesterday Mozilla announced that we will be updating the MPL, with the aim of making the license simpler, easier to use, and more robust. Mitchell’s post captures what we want to do in more depth; if you’re interested in the process, you should go read it and our full website at mpl.mozilla.org.
I [...]
The DOJ is breaking up ES&S, the country’s largest provider of voting machinery, the OSDV project seems to be gaining some attention, and RHAT stock recently hit a five-year high. This seems like as good a time as any to dig up my ‘Red Hat should be in electronic voting‘ post and followup. Take the [...]
I got some nice birthday gifts (mostly the ability to be around family) but possibly the best gift I got was this Wondermark strip:
I will henceforth refer to reading a contract as ‘looking for locomotives.’
As a bonus, and related to my recent post about plain english in the law, Wondermark is apparently working with the [...]
Visiting family for my birthday; if I don’t respond to your email it is because I am soaking in sunshine.
How many entries are we showing above?
For now, we are showing up to 50 entries on each page. Entries that
are too short are filtered out. For more entries, please use
archives.
|
Connect to Peace Corps Journals
About the Journal
Contact Us
Disclaimer:
| |
| Copyright (c) 2010 |
