Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

Technology conquers all, right? Except football (American, that is). The pace of technology is wondrous indeed. No corner of our lives seems safe from digital invasion, from picture frames to pasta makers. For years now, we have been threatened with Internet-enabled refrigerators, and perhaps 2011 will see it so.

Last Thursday the European Commission took a major step forward on the “openness” scale. The occasion was the release of a new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which definitively endorsed the use of open source friendly standards when providing “public services” within the EU.  Too bad they didn't stop there.

Last week NIST published a Request for Information that went entirely unnoticed in the press. It's goal is to assess the “Effectiveness of Federal Agency Participation in Standardization in Select Technology Sectors,” and it shouldn't be ignored.

A variety of constituencies from the West have taken it upon themselves to reach out to China to "educate" the Chinese about the existing global standards development infrastructure, and to urge them to take part in that infrastructure in the same way as do other countries.

Ever since the proposed acquisition of Novell by Attachmate Corporation there has been much curiosity, but almost no information, relating to the other major piece of the deal: the acquisition of 882 patents by a consortium led by Microsoft for $450 million.

Two days have now passed since Novell announced the high-level terms of its proposed sale, and so far the press has not been able to prize any additional details out of the parties involved.  But if you know how to read between the lines, there's a lot more information there for the taking.

I know, I know, you've always wanted to know, but have been too shy to ask. In this article, I review the situations where a new consortium should and — as importantly — should not, be formed. I also provide a decision tree for determining what activities a new consortium should undertake to increase the likelihood of its success, a description of the infrastructural elements needed to support these activities, and an indication of the stage of an organization's maturity at which the addition of each activity becomes advisable.

After sixteen years of working in parallel to the traditional standards infrastructure, the World Wide Web Consortium has taken an interesting decision: to begin submitting selected W3C Recommendations to that same system for endorsement.

Heaven help us all (all us Americans, anyway) — it's election time again. That means we've once again descended into a morass of partisan invective, not to mention lies, damn lies, and (of course) statistics. Except that this election year it seems that everyone is behaving even worse than last time, when everyone acted even worse than the time before, when, well, do you sense a trend here?

As Oracle's acquisition of Sun demonstrates, FOSS licenses alone aren't enough to protect developers. Luckily, there are other well-tested legal tools available. So why don't developers use them?

If you’re interested in the intersection of technology, government, standards and open source software, you really want to be paying close attention to Europe these days. That’s because the EU is where all of the really interesting, high-level IT policy action is.

Companies that participate in hundreds of standard setting organizations (SSOs) often bemoan the continuing launch of more and more such organizations. Why, they are wont to ask, are so many new ones being formed all the time? And indeed, the aggregate participation costs for such companies in terms of membership dues and personnel are very high.

This morning brought the significant -  and long overdue – announcement of the launch of an independent foundation to host development of the open source, ODF-compliant OpenOffice productivity suite.  It should have happened ten years ago.

Page through a major newspaper (remember newspapers?) today and you’re likely to run into two enormous ads, one by Google and one by AOL. Leaving aside the irony of Google advertising in a form of media that it has almost competed out of existence, there’s something potentially transformative going on here that’s worth exploring.

In 2005 I dedicated an issue of Standards Today to the future of the Semantic Web. The centerpiece was a very detailed interview (over 5,700 words) with the inventor of both the Web and the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee. It's now five years later, and the Semantic Web may - finally - be ready to take off. Better hope it does.

Have you been missing your weekly fix of The Alexandria Project? If so, you're in luck. I've been re-working the book in preparation for approaching a literary agent, and figured it needed a quicker, edgier start than the original. What's your opinion?

As most of the technology world knows by now, Oracle has brought a suit for patent infringement against Google, asserting that the Java elements incorporated into Google’s Android operating system infringe patents that Oracle acquired when it took over Sun Microsystems.  What no one yet knows for sure yet is why?

Last summer, a new organization was announced with the goal of promoting the uptake of open source software by the U.S. federal government. Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations, and its celebrating by announcing an awards program to recognize those that have been most influential in advancing its goals. Maybe you know someone who's contributions to open source should be recognized.

In which the world ends - or doesn't. You'll just have to read it to find out.

In which the FBI gives chase, our hero escapes, The End draws Near