E-Commerce Blog

Sometimes there’s nothing like a good lawsuit to force people to acknowledge just how much something is worth. Take FOSS, for example. Sure, there are estimates made of its value from time to time — the latest, in fact, just recently put the kernel alone at $1.4 billion — but for many people out there, “free” in price tends to be viewed as free of value. So thank goodness for Matthew Katzer! It’s all because of him that the Model Train case went to court — and that there’s now an official outcome confirming that free software has real monetary value.

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A Big, Linuxy ‘Thank You’ to Matthew Katzer

It’s hard not to have an overwhelming sense of deja vu every time word of a new Microsoft patent deal reaches the news. Such was the case last week, when Redmond’s legal eagles gleefully proclaimed their success in making a patent cross-license offer that Amazon apparently couldn’t refuse. The is particularly notable for its relevance to open source. The Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin played down the agreement — “nothing to see here,” he wrote — but bloggers had a hard time keeping their speculation to themselves.

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The Echo of TomToms in the Amazon Deal

As the general notion of cloud computing continues to permeate the collective IT imagination, an offshoot vision holds that multiple business-to-business players could use the cloud approach to build extended business process ecosystems. It’s sort of like a marketplace in the cloud on steroids, on someone else’s servers, perhaps to engage on someone’s business objectives, and maybe even satisfy some customers along the way. It’s really a way to make fluid markets adapt at Internet speed, at low cost, to business requirements, as they come and go.

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Nothing New Under the Business Commerce Cloud?

There was a lot of news in the FOSS world last week, and it seems fair to say that the overall atmosphere was positive. First, following the widespread outcry that followed IBM and Canonical’s release of a Microsoft-free desktop package in Africa last month, the two companies announced last week that a similar offering is now available for companies in the U.S. as well. Then, from the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead department, came word that SCO has fired its wildly litigious CEO Darl McBride.

Going Microsoft-Free, Saying Buh-Bye to McBride

The nation needs to give the same urgency to making sure all Americans have broadband access as the Eisenhower administration did in building an interstate highway system a half-century ago, a report released Friday concluded. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy expressed worry about whether the news industry’s financial woes will make for a less educated citizenry and considered whether the government should prop up independent journalists.

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Panel Wants Broadband to Blanket US