
Alcatel-Lucent Open Sources its API Management Engine
I remember when OpenStack was announced – the creation of an open source solution in a formerly entirely proprietary area was something of a bomb shell. Regardless of your thoughts around open stack as a product (or, more correctly a series of product), it’s hard to be critical of an initiative that at its core […]
Alcatel Lucent’s Big API Bet
Last week Alcatel Lucent made an announcement which, at first blush, seems kind of boring. They’ve released a methodology for creating APIs, they’ve made the methodology available through Creative Commons as a front end for a new consulting practice that helps enterprises work through the processes involved in moving to

Thinking about Open Data, with a little help from the Data Hub
Continuing to explore the adoption of explicit Open Data licenses, I’ve been having a trawl through some of the data in the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub. I’m disappointed – but not surprised – by the extent to which widely applicable Open Data licenses are (not!) being applied. For those who are impatient or already aware of the background, […]

Survey: How open is your data?
Back in 2006 as we rolled out the first public draft of the Talis Community Licence, the world of data licensing seemed a simple place. Today, the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub contains 3,888 data sets, many of which are explicitly licensed with respect to the Open Definition. But many are still not explicitly licensed. Over at […]

Fixing Software Patents, One Hack At Time
Software patents are broken and patent trolls are seriously hurting innovation. Companies are spending more money on buying patents to launch offensive strikes against other companies instead of competing by building great products. There are numerous patent horror stories I could outline where they are being used for all purposes except to innovate. In fact […]

Open is good – but encouragement better than mandate
Image via Wikipedia Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work […]

Licensing of Linked Data
As part of a workshop at this year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), former colleague Leigh Dodds prepared an interesting diagram on the ways in which resources comprising the Linked Data Cloud are currently licensed. For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations […]

Final Closing Thoughts on Gnomedex 09
Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr When you go to a convention you really never know what you are really going to get. Sometimes you get something totally cool that makes you stop and think, while at other times you get stuff that is so mind bogglingly dull that it is hard to believe that […]

Wired Does Not Get Creative Commons Licencing?
I found a good summary assessment of the recent MS Office announcement over at WebMonkey: MS Office on the Web: What it Is and What it Isn’t. I liked to content enough to link to it from my hastily written initial take, then as I looked at it again, I found something weird. Do you […]