For seven months, a New York Times reporter named David Rohde was held prisoner by Taliban kidnappers. However, you wouldn't learn that from reading The New York Times -- or even Wikipedia, for that matter. In addition to other news organizations, the Times reportedly asked Wikipedia not to publish information on the abduction. For Wikipedia, that meant monitoring Rohde's entry and quickly deleting information regarding the kidnapping as soon as anyone put it up. Everyone involved seemed to have good intentions.[More...]
You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that's what happened in the Mono debate late last week. "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction," RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation's site.[More...]
For seven months, New York Times reporter David Rohde was held by Taliban kidnappers. During his captivity, both his newspaper and Wikipedia kept quiet about his plight. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales reportedly agreed to a request from The New York Times to delete all references to the kidnapping on Rohde's Wikipedia entry.[More...]
There's no doubt some companies have succeeded in using virtual worlds for branding and interaction with their customers, whether through in-world stores, billboards or other means. Wells Fargo, for instance, has been operating its Stagecoach Island aimed at young customers for roughly four years and says it is pleased with the results.[More...]
Linux bloggers are never shy about laying blame at Microsoft's door, but in recent days the accusations seemed to be flying faster than ever. First, Groklaw published a post entitled, "Linux on Netbooks: The Smoking Gun." "Microsoft continues their predatory ways," lamented Anonymous in the Groklaw comments.[More...]
Well, the proverbial ink hadn't even dried on our recent column about smartbooks and ARM when Nvidia came around and doused the excitement with a bucket of ice water. The prospect of Linux in general or Android in particular running on an ARM smartbook has had many in the blogosphere salivating, but Nvidia's Mike Rayfield recently said his company prefers Microsoft's Windows CE over Android.[More...]
It wasn't long after the launch of Linden Lab's Second Life back in 2003 that companies and organizations around the globe began to sit up and take notice. The prospect of millions of potential customers -- all flocking to the same destination and congregating there -- is enough to whet the appetite of even the most conservative and change-averse organization, after all.[More...]
In the general population, "Mono" may be best known for infecting teenagers with the "kissing disease." On the Linux blogs, it's recently caused a different kind of anguish as geeks far and wide have debated whether it's infected Linux too. It's a different Mono, of course, but its effects -- or, at least, the discussion of them -- have been no less agonizing.[More...]
Cloud computing is remaking just about every software category -- and project management is no exception. In the on-premise software era, collaboration was limited by the technology of a particular firm, as well as the security requirements of a particular industry. That was then, of course.[More...]
SourceForge, a media services and e-commerce company that provides open source software downloads and development, is enjoying the best of both business worlds. It is one of the largest open source software repositories -- the SourceForge Web site has more than 30 million unique visitors per month -- and it reported more than $40 million in earnings for its last quarter, with no outstanding debt.[More...]