Yesterday's links, September 24th 2007
ciaran
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Montag, 24.September 2007
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Possibly interesting links I saw yesterday.
- Globalisation
Institute calls for a ban on bundling MS Windows with computers
- this isn't new for the free software community, but it's
interesting to see an outside group making the same argument.
- The Confusion
of Tongues - an essay by Bruce Perens about the flaws in the EIF 2.0
Gartner report which recommends that the European Commission stop
recommending open standards and free software.
- Marketing
Cygnus Support, an essay about a company that played a big role
in free software's history. Also, near the end there's the
"Inside Cygnus Engineering" reports for March 1992 to
September 1994, which show the development of GCC and other GNU
packages. This is probably mostly of interest to people researching
free software history from the 90s.
- Microsoft
lobbying against the Google-DoubleClick merger - I don't know
the details of this case but most large corporation mergers are bad
for society. Microsoft's logic should probably be taken a step further
by splitting up Microsoft. This merger is particularly worrying because it
involves two of the world's largest databases of personal
information such as browsing habits, web searches, emails, your location, who you
talk with, and your name/logins. The reason the article is interesting though is that it discusses large
corporation lobbying tactics. This isn't a Microsoft-only issue.
They're just a bit more flagrant.
- Also on this topic,
there's Privacy
International's June 2007 report strongly criticising Google's
respect for privacy (the report cautiously praises BBC, eBay, Last.fm,
LiveJournal, and Wikipedia).
See also:
the archive
of Yesterday's links.
--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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