Written by: Matthew Hile 5/8/2008 5:38 AM
I have listened, three times so far, to a wonderful podcast of Eben Molegan a Professor at the Columbia Law School and the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. In a "discussion" with the famous publisher and proponent of open source software Tim O'Reilly, Eban offers Tim the "opportunity to engage in a dialogue" or rakes him over the coals (it is sometimes not clear which) about the relative lack of importance of the concept of open software and the increasingly important conflict between the rights to keep things private and the rights to keep things open. While we don't get very far in this discussion it is lively and fascinating and makes me want to learn more about Modlen's thinking. In the course of the talk he dropped a few wonderfully contrarian ideas. We are not headed toward a centralized (in the clouds) system but rather have a wildly decentralized one with massive storage and computing power available to us outside of the cloud. Soon people will wake up to the serious security problems of AJAX and people will run from those applications as they do from ActiveX applications today. (This view point is also shared by Security Now's Steve Gibson.) Soon people will realize that the all knowing security and spy organization (aka Google) whose major item for sale is advertisement is really worth very little and is only a tiny part of that which is important. If you have interest in software and freedom and in the clash between competing legitimate freedoms give this fascinating and entertaining discussion a listen.
I have listened, three times so far, to a wonderful podcast of Eben Molegan a Professor at the Columbia Law School and the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. In a "discussion" with the famous publisher and proponent of open source software Tim O'Reilly, Eban offers Tim the "opportunity to engage in a dialogue" or rakes him over the coals (it is sometimes not clear which) about the relative lack of importance of the concept of open software and the increasingly important conflict between the rights to keep things private and the rights to keep things open. While we don't get very far in this discussion it is lively and fascinating and makes me want to learn more about Modlen's thinking.
In the course of the talk he dropped a few wonderfully contrarian ideas.
If you have interest in software and freedom and in the clash between competing legitimate freedoms give this fascinating and entertaining discussion a listen.
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