Geek 2.0

As far as I know, this is a first and an interesting sign of how open-source software is being considered by the industry.
Llyod’s of London is planning to offer insurance protection against IP litigation involving open-source software.

I can not resist to comment on that one.
An HP VP made a call during his yesterday’s speech at LinuxWorld Conference San Francisco for IBM and Sun to invalidate their current open-source licenses and re-publish the code under the terms of the GPL.

I can’t disagree more !

One of the essential value of open-source software is freedom, and one of the concept behind this freedom is the concept of choice. The choice a user has to choose one operating system or another, the choice the developer has to license its code using the legal framework he wants.
I can not see the advantage of having a single open-source license for the whole community and for all pieces of code, and does not understand the value HP could have in that situation.
The GPL is, in my opinion, a very restrictive license, obliging developers to publish any derived code under the term of the very same GPL (see section 2.b.). And although the third version of the GPL is just around the corner, I don’t read any significant changes in its major directions.
Other licenses offer more freedom of choice to the developers : Apache and the other BSD derivatives, Sun’s CDDL etc …
Maybe I missed something in HP’s strategy ? Please share your thoughts as well !

Most often, I found the US government and its agencies quite Microsoft friendly. Wanna have an example ? Here is the latest one.

The Copyright Office invited comments on an upcoming Web service for prospective copyright owners that may launch with support for Microsoft Internet Explorer only.

“(…) At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office’s system for online preregistration, it is not entirely clear whether the system will be compatible with Web browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.1 and higher (…)”

Should this be accepted, this means that people will need a Windows-based PC and IE to preregister copyrighted material in the future.

I like these short news that we can found here and here about Solaris. Almost every day drives its own bag of new stuffs, do we really to need to prove OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) is gaining momentum in the market place ?

I recently spent a couple of days in London talking to a .Net customer about Java Enterprise Edition architecture and development.

It was really interesting to share views and experiences with these guys. I realized how much the architecture and the concepts are close to each other, altough our vocabulary differ.

One night, the customer convince us to take the tube (for US-only guys : the tube is the UK subway system) to enjoy a dinner downtown.
It’s difficult to travel in there without thinking about what recently hapened but people continue to live and work as before, even at night, the car was crowded. Security is impressive as well : armed police officers and (pre-attacks) video camera are everywhere.

This morning, I found out this very short but entertaining article (well, at least entertaining for the geeks we all are) on the little history of the DNS system. Guess who was first to register its domain name between Sun, Microsoft and Oracle ?