machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman celebrates 15 years of open source:

“Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. ‘Hello everybody out there using Minix,’ began the message, ‘I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) . . .’. Linus Torvalds couldn’t have been more wrong…”

Read the rest here.

Well, not quite. But this week’s New Statesman column is a response to a post Guido Fawkes wrote criticising openDemocracy after the New Media Awards last week (which we won, by the way). I admit it was a bit mean of me to pull him up on his misspelling of smorgasbord:

“When I was a little girl, I dreamed of having my own column. At 27, I appear to have fulfilled my ambition. Unfortunately for my sense of self-achievement, the whole bloody world is now a columnist. Volunteering an opinion on the issues of the day is as easy as setting up an account with one of the many blogging service providers. More often than not, these new voices ape the worst of those in the national press, generalising from trifles, affecting an air of self-importance that barely conceals the poor levels of research, compromised upon to file on time and…”

Read the rest here.

Guido’s original post is here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman is on the Gowers Review of Intellectual property and a report from Rufus Pollock for the ippr:

“As the British Phonographic Industry, the body that represents the UK music business, begins a fresh assault on those who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to download music illegally off the internet, it’s worth asking if there might be a better way to protect the creative industries than by punishing potential customers.

This autumn, the government will wind up a nine-month review tasked with examining intellectual property (IP) law…”

Read the rest here:

Useful links:

• The value of the public domain, Rufus Pollock
• Inside the Creative Industries: Copyright on the ground, Anthony Lilley
• Innovating for Success: The intellectual property review and economic competitiveness, Lord Sainsbury
  

This week’s column in the New Statesman is all about bubble 2.0:

“It is unlikely that when Prince penned the immortal line “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999″, what he had in mind was a bunch of old media professionals hunkered in a central London hotel basement earnestly discussing ways to “monetise content”. Yet at a Guardian new media conference in March, representatives from first Microsoft, then Virgin Radio, then the Daily Mirror, took to the stage to unveil their thoughts on profit in the information economy. It was reminiscent of the years before the dotcom bubble burst.

Spurred on not least by the rise of Google, the money people are back…”

Read the rest here.