Elsevier fucked up
Ed pointed me to an article in Elsevier (a Dutch magazine) about Open Source and the Firefox browser in particular. Even though one cannot expect a journalist to do really deep research (well, we should expect it, but the masses really don’t, so it’s of no use to expect it), to at least verify your ramblings would be nice. Especially the last alinea, which talked about how Microsoft’s vulnerabilities are only abused because it’s so wide-spread caused me some annoyance. Anyone who really thinks that’s why Windows is so many times more attacked, I’d like to say, read this about Linux virusses.
Piracy is an obligatory part of the industry!
It has always felt right, but I’ve never been able to really have good argument in favour of it. Luckily, O’Reilly’s Radar pointed me to an article by Chris Anderson about how piracy can never be completely be removed and that it even is healthy from an economical point of view.
Google’s Talk not connecting to other servers
Yesterday a lot has been written and talked about Google‘s latest addition to their Beta products: Talk, an IM client. Luckily, they decided to use XMPP, an Open protocol, used by many Open Source messaging servers (Jabber is the one that comes to mind, since we use it ourselves). I think this is really good for IM in general and Open Source protocols in particular. Google also tells us they plan to implement SIP, another Open protocol used primarily for VoIP.
My only gripe with their service, which renders it unusable for me, is that they don’t support connections with other servers. The nice thing about XMPP and Jabber in particular is that everyone can use their own domain with their own XMPP server. Alas, for the moment, Google isn’t supporting that.
(Shameless plug, but if they ever do support it, we provide free XMPP support for domains hosted at our servers!)
