Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

Right after yesterday’s post about Lessig’s interview at O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, has written a piece contradicting Lessig’s belief that most creative works should not be copyrighted.

I’ve been reading Anderson’s blog, The Long Tail, since he started it. Last fall, Anderson wrote an essay about the changing economics at the “small” end of the distribution curve of products such as books and videos. The original essay is published at Change This as a manifesto in PDF format–check it out.

Read Anderson’s take on Lessig in The Long Tail vs. Lessig.

The O’Reilly Network has a fascinating Interview with Lawrence Lessig, where he explores these and other topics.

“… if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing–you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it’s understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world.”

Novell is sponsoring development of a new email/calendar server called Hula. This promises to be an Exchange killer, providing standards-based calendar sharing and storage using WebCal to share calendars and free/busy information. It’s also a complete SMTP/IMAP/POP server with a built-in web interface, vacation messages, and eventually the ability to do server-side sorting and spam and virus filtering.

The project was announced last week, but they already have a working version, mainly because it’s built upon Novell’s NetMail product. Evolution, Chandler, and Mozilla Thunderbird will all support this soon!

Hah! You gotta love this one: It Pays To Read License Agreements. PC Pitstop put a little clause in their software license agreement, saying to contact them for financial compensation for reading that far. Their software was downloaded over 3,000 times over 4 months before somebody contacted them. The guy got a check for $1,000!

What does this have to do with Open Source? Everything. Read the fine print of the GPL, or just about any other open source license. Then read the fine print of your typical proprietary application. Don’t know about you, but when I finish reading the open source license, I have a smile on my face and am grateful to the original developers. When I finish reading the typical proprietary license, I’m typically pissed off, exhausted, and feeling trapped.

Try it for yourself and see! And leave a comment below.

At Freelock Computing, several of our clients are looking for decent project management tools. We think we’re going to roll our own solution, but have found a few new options.

First of all, a cross-platform desktop project management tool: GanttPV - Open Source Software for Project Management. Many of the desktop-oriented tools are rapidly gaining features comparable to MS Project, mainly in terms of resource scheduling. GanttProject is definitely getting more mature, while Ganttlet appears to be mostly ignored but just the thing for whipping out a quick Gantt chart.

Next, a couple of web-based applications. Achievo is a basic resource scheduling and time tracking application. While the interface seems pretty lame, it has some great plugins available, and may well meet your needs quickly. Finally, Projectory is a Perl-based project scheduling application.

Great background information on what I always considered to be “Windows Networking”. The author of Samba writes about the Myths about Samba.

A whole series of stories about Intellectual Property. First, an interesting story in the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail: How copyright could be killing culture. Unfortunately, this one is no longer freely available, but it argues that the way television programs have been locked up in copyright is stifling the development of culture, citing a PBS documentary that can no longer be shown due to the copyright on some of its footage.

Patents are usually regarded as something positive for innovation, but if you haven’t looked closely lately, you may be surprised to find them having the opposite effect. Here’s a set of rules to encourage innovation, published by Science Hobbyist: Rules for unconventional researchers. And here’s an inventor’s explanation of why he doesn’t patent his inventions: Eagle-Research We Don’t Patent.

Two interesting stories from Mad Penguin: a good essay by Christian Einfeldt posted at: Open source is disrupting the fourth estate.
And another: Open Source: spinning straw into gold.
What an exciting time we live in–no longer do big companies hold a monopoly on information.

Here’s an interesting story about things to consider when moving larger businesses to Linux. Linux.com | Windows to Linux Migration Guide.

Wired has a story about how current copyright law has made it illegal to view a PBS documentary film series from the late 1980s. Wired News: Putting Eyeballs on Copyright Law

The main motive of the Free Software Movement is to reverse the trend of locking up copyrights, explicitly making “Intellectual Property” available to everyone.

In this chapter of the book, I wrote about Mesh Networking as being the cutting edge of wide area networks. At that writing, there were a couple of proprietary mesh networking systems in place, one consisting of wireless lamp-posts in the UK.

Now the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network has released an open source mesh networking distribution, that automatically configures nodes, routes traffic, and provides reliable networking without needing an Internet connection.

From the FAQ:

The service CU-Wireless nodes provide is like DSL or cable modem. There is an ethernet jack on the wireless node and your home computer plugs into that. The wireless network up on the rooftops serves a similar purpose as the telephone company’s wires and poles: it connects your node to the Internet, but without any nasty wires between the nodes!

The wireless nodes, unlike a cable or DSL modem, do double-duty: when you put a node at your house, you actually help to increase the capacity and reach of the network!

An important aspect of this network is that when you add your node to it, you become part-owner of the network. This is one of the reasons it is a community network.

Read more at Wi-Fi Networking News: CUWiN Goes Public with Open-Source Mesh System and the main web site for the project.

Tech World is reporting that a migration of 55,000 users to a Linux desktop has been successfully completed. Techworld.com - World’s largest Linux migration gets major boost

As a computer consultant helping small businesses, one of the first things I do is install Firefox on the Windows computers. While there are still a handful of sites that only work with Internet Explorer, universally I find new users like the Fox… Seth Godin has quick instructions, if you need a hand, or another reason to choose Firefox: Seth’s Blog: Fix your computer.