Simon Phipps @webmink@mastodon.cc

Also: I was free to offer Opensource.Com that article because I'm supported by Patreon patrons rather than depending on artificial scarcity to pay the bills. Red Hat only take free content, they don't pay authors, which I guess is why corporate placements like yesterday's by Facebook's outside counsel are common.

If you like seeing my articles on OpenSource.Com, do please vote them up ;-)

https://opensource.com/article/17/9/5-reasons-facebooks-react-license-was-mistake

Red Hat's opensource.com published a piece by Facebook's attorney Heather Meeker yesterday that was fairly scornful of concerns about the React + Patent Grant license they are using for React and almost every other open source project. Facebook's patentleft license may be legal but the way they did it is very community-hostile.

Delightfully, Red Hat agreed to publish my response explaining that.

https://opensource.com/article/17/9/5-reasons-facebooks-react-license-was-mistake

No, using open source doesn't automatically mean "going it alone" and blaming the community when you do and you fail is plain wrong. https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/11/choice-of-insurance/

With the core Solaris team laid off, here's Oracle's score card on how it did with Sun.
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/

My regular reminder that I now only have Patreon as regular income from wriitng and consulting. I have a bunch of lovely #OneDollarPatreon backers and every one is keeping me on-air. https://patreon.com/webmink

TDF decided to leave deploymentm of LibreOffice Online to its community. So I am delighted to see Kolab Systems AG are now offering LibreOffice Online as part of their Kolab Now offering.

If you wish G Suite was build as open source software & hosted without the concerns of Google's business model or of US ownership, this is a solution you should definitely consider.

https://medium.com/@KolabSystems/kolab-now-online-office-suite-now-available-for-all-power-users-920de1024aba

Facebook's BSD+Patent license combo fails not because of the license itself but because it ignores the deeper nature of open source and software freedom.

https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/27/5-reasons-facebooks-react-license-was-a-mistake/

Why is having a patent license until you commence litigation worse than not having one at all? New addition to my Apache vs Facebook overview:

https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/16/apache-bans-facebooks-license-combo/#implied

The Apache Software Foundation has moved the “Facebook BSD+Patent grant” license combination (FB+PL) to its “Category X” licensing list, effectively banning inclusion of any software under FB+PL from Apache projects. That included RocksDB, which has consequently just dropped FB+PL and added the Apache License v2 on Github.

Keeping track here:
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/16/apache-bans-facebooks-license-combo/

This Withings-wrecked-by-Nokia story is exactly the thing that triggered the software freedom movement
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40555752

Individual judgement about the presence of software freedom in a license is not the same as community consensus expressed through OSI approval.

https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/12/why-osi-license-approval-matters/

Anyone I know on Mastodon using SteemIt? I am trying it here: https://steemit.com/@webmink

It's quite ridiculous that the Catholic Church has decided to bar coeliacs from Mass.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/09/gluten-free-bread-for-holy-communion-is-toast-says-vatican

/cc @zak

In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons.

https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/09/drm-is-toxic-to-culture/