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Free licensing lowers the barrier of entry to creating cultural works, which unlocks a dynamic where people can much realize their ideas much easier - and where culture can actually live, creating memes, adjusting them to new situations and using new approaches with old topics.

Software Wars is about the idea that with more cooperation among scientists, we can build a better and fun world

Break out the popcorn: A new crowdfunding campaign, launched overnight, aims to raise $150,000 to complete a movie about the open-source software movement and the “war for freedom” against the world of proprietary software.

Congratulations on leaving Microsoft. Unless you have bills to pay, you won’t regret it. I left at the end of 2004, and have since learned of a vast and amazing — but still flawed – world of computing out there. For example, I discovered that we should already have cars that (optionally) drive us around and computers that talk to us. Linux on the desktop is powerful and rich but failing because of several strategic mistakes. Google claims to be a friend of Linux and free software, but most of their interesting AI code is locked up. Programming should be a part of basic math literacy for every child. The biotechnology world is proprietary like Microsoft, which is stunting progress in new medicines.

I think we should either get Debian in FSF [free-distros list], or document (from our POV) why Debian is not there.

The Apache OpenOffice.org effort must be considered a fork of LibreOffice, even though it has its predecessor’s name. The original OpenOffice.org project is dead. (The project is dead, but the Website lingers on…) So this isn’t the original, this is a fork. It’s a bad fork: it’s bad because there are no significant complaints about the direction of the LibreOffice effort.

As the date of the Apache OpenOffice release approaches, and the final release candidate wends its way through a couple of rounds of approval / voting, I thought it might help clarify the current situation to have a side-by-side summary of what is in each suite.

I'm working on a movie Software Wars based on the book. Here is 9 minutes of the raw audio of the interview with Linus Torvalds. The rest will be available in 2012.

While Torvalds is famously reluctant to speak, he did take the stage at LinuxCon North America 2011 for a conversation with Greg Kroah-Hartman.

The consensus amongst those of us who think it is even possible to build a space elevator is that it will take more than 20 years. But how can you say how long it will take to do something until you specify how many resources it will require and how many people you’ve assigned to the task?

I have nothing against Apache's version of OpenOffice.org -- even though the donation does seem like one last spiteful gesture by Oracle against The Document Foundation. But given the challenges it faces and LibreOffice's head start, I also see little chance of it succeeding

Many of us want all of these good ideas and energies to be channeled. The LibreOffice team is not a raging success yet and they’ve just climbed some big hills. This is my list for the arguments against the proposed plan.

I was baptized into the zero bugs religion about 20 years ago. This was before the web and time-based releases, but these only add complications, and are yet compatible with zero bugs all the time. As a beginner, you can cheat such as zero bugs older than 6 months / 2 releases, or give yourself 1,000.

Zero bugs is impossible, and that is a philosophical discussion. If you look through your current list of bugs, nearly every one looks scary to me and important to someone. You currently have 2,800 active bugs (http://bit.ly/LinuxBugs) The last time looked, I found the median age was 10 months. In general, bugs should be fixed in the next release and so therefore 3 months.

The Linux audio stack is mature now. What is needed now is a realization that your customers want Linux support. Note, the WINE support for Ableton Live is getting solid today, but it does have problems. On the latest Ubuntu, it installs and runs, which is a huge step forward, but it has some perf glitches (some things are very slow), and the audio doesn’t work. With Ableton supporting Linux directly, or via Wine, ideally both, these problems could easily and quickly get fixed. A free / GPL Ableton would be very nice, but a paid-for version of Ableton on Linux enables users to run a free OS, which is even better. Not supporting Linux is damaging to the freedom of Ableton’s customers. If everyone “hates” Microsoft, why isn’t their more support for the alternate? Microsoft continues to win because of the lack of vision or laziness of others.

Software patents are frequently in the technology news, a multi-billion dollar licensing model existing in parallel to the traditional ways people acquire technology. Very few patents are enforced, but those that are often result in the transfer of secret and large amounts of money — not connected to the amount of work required to create the invention, but to the thickness of the wallet of the defendant.

Sun’s first mistake with Java was locking up the codebase, letting few see it, and letting even fewer improve it, so that today, there exists only a small community of people, outside of Sun/Oracle, who understand and are improving the core.

Draft of an open letter to the LKML about faster Linux world domination. Hope people find it interesting and would appreciate feedback.

If we were already talking to our computers, etc. as we should be, I wouldn’t feel a need to write this to you. Given current rates of progress, Linux still seems a generation away from being the priceless piece of free software useful to every child and PhD. This army your kernel enables now has millions of people, but they are not working efficiently. My mail one year ago listed the biggest workitems, but I realize now I should have focused on one. In a sentence, I have discovered and “proved” that we need GC lingua franca(s).

If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the baby boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a baby boomer. While he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people, after studying Wikipedia and Linux, I see that the proprietary development model he adopted has greatly stifled the progress of technology his generation should have provided to us.

Future software advancements like cars that drive themselves will trigger a new perspective on whether we can build a space elevator, and in what timeframe.