Technology Articles

It's important that we remember what makes the Internet so interesting and unique. There are two crucial characteristics:

1. It's fundamentally decentralized, meaning you can cut out any part without affecting the rest,
2. It allows freedom of access, meaning you have the same ability to access and write it as anyone else.

Because they permit extraordinary flexibility and rapid growth, both of these characteristics have brought the Internet way beyond any other network. Today, they are endangered. How come, and what can we do about it?

As Apple's Steve Jobs is announcing that they suddenly "want native third-party applications on the iPhone", something its users have been yearning to have ever since they started buying these phones (even if it meant hacking them), Steve justifies their prior resistance to this kind of openness by security threats. As he says, they are "trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once — provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc."

In our earlier article, "Facts and Friction on Open Source and Free Software" we have explained where "Open Source" is coming from and what is its relation to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation that represents it. One of the points made was that the term Open Source deliberately de-emphasized a certain aspect of what defines Free Software as originally specified by the FSF in order to make Free Software, albeit under the new term, better appeal to the business world.

Have a look at LINA. It's a really clever idea - it solves the same problem as Java tries to solve: making all operating systems equivalent using a virtual machine so developers won't have to support multiple platforms. But there's a difference: LINA doesn't require the developer to work with different tools than he is used to, such as the Java compiler, because LINA is linux. Also, there will be a large amount of software available for it from the start, again because LINA is linux.

A long coming interview between the Libervis Community and Sun Microsystems representative is finally here. We have asked Patrick Finch, the leader of the OpenSolaris Content project and one of the guys working on FLOSS within the company, questions which we believe might be of interest to anyone who uses or values Free Software.