Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

The addition of Huawei to the US "Entity List" has created a flurry of confusion and concern among open source and open standards organizations wondering whether they need to kick the Chinese company out. The answer to that question will likely vary, depending on the transparency of the process of the specific organization.

Advances in science offer increasing degrees of precision, but usually at ever-increasing cost. And not just in terms of millions of dollars of complex instrumentation.

Everything changes over time, from the constitutions of nations to political theories. Should the Open Source Software Definition be any different?

By joining OIN, Microsoft is legally pledging to make 60,000 patents available to Linux System developers. But it was already subject to a far more powerful obligation.

There's nothing like a new licensing term to catch people's attention

Google/Microsoft/Twitter/Facebook's new Data Transfer Project promises to make our data more secure and more portable. If only they'd used the right tool for the job.

Ten years ago Microsoft and Linux seemed to be in a fight to the death. Today, Microsoft is one of the biggest supporters of open source projects. Still, it's acquisition of the globe's biggest development host leaves some uneasy. Should they be?

The twenty-five countries participating in a global standards effort to create security standards for the blockchain were surprised to find some unusual national representatives from Russia involved: employees of the FSB, the state security service that took over from the KGB.

There’s a belief in some open source circles that standards can be consigned to the ash heap of history now that OSS development has become so central to information technology. While it’s true that today many use cases can be addressed with OSS where open standards would have been used in the past, that approach can’t solve all problems. Blockchains are great, but without the right data standards to go with them, some may never succeed.

What if you controlled all of your personal data instead of a dozen enormous companies? That could happen.

Can open source solve all interoperability problems? It can, but a mix of open source and open standards can be best of all. Kubernetes shows us how it's done.

Fifteen years ago new open source licenses were popping up like mushrooms, complicating the spread of Open Source. It took a decade to sort things out. Can Open Data escape the same fate? (Yes!)

Open source is at a critical juncture. The challenge? Fitting all the pieces together in complex stacks without using the right glue.

The Supreme Court issued an opinion today that restricts the ability of patent owners to choose the court in which they bring an infringement suit. That means life just got harder for patent trolls.

Remember the bad old days of SCO, FUD and ultimate glory? An announcement by Google this week suggests there may be a patent tempest just over the horizon for Android.

Along with death and taxes, two things appear inevitable. The first is that wireless connectivity will not only be built into everything we can imagine, but into everything we can't as well. The buyer should have the right to decide whether to be connected or not.

Wait - What? Actually, there's more to it than you might think

According to Donald Trump, "the US Presidential Election is rigged!" Unfortunately, that's easier to do than you might like to think.

Today the old Gray Lady, the New York Times, no less, weighed in on election hacking in an Op/Ed piece titled The Election Won't be Rigged. But it Could be Hacked... The solution, according to the author, is to require that all voting machines work off of hand-marked paper ballots that can then be reviewed after the election to discover any fraud. Incredibly, not only do many voting machines now in use not use paper ballots, but they don’t preserve any sort of primary electronic record, either – just the final totals (authentic or hacked, as the case may be).

Well, it's about time. People are finally realizing how easy it would be to hack an election - assuming it hasn't happened already.