I have had a a full week at OSCON for the beginning and BlogHer for the weekend. I was still in Chicago still at the W hotel as I wrote this yesturday.
So I will start-off with Slashdot Headlines:
Terms of Service for Online services can not be changed without notifying users. YEAH!
Hopefully this will create an insentive for the industry to become more transparent about the terms of service they are using and adopting an easy to understand set of icons.
Parents Encouraged to buy Office 2007 for their kids. Of course Slashdot wonders about free alternatives. A friend in Portland was telling me his girlfriend a teacher in the schools there was prohibited from downloading FireFox onto her Windows computer. She raised this issue and got the prohibition reversed and even BETTER the school district this year is adopting Open Office.
Outcomes from O'Reilly Open Source Convention
Eben Moglen take on Tim O'Reilly
From the Zend Blog:
Eben used this event to re-invigorate the debate about software freedom by attacking Tim O’Reilly, who he claims has wasted his time cozying up with the new powerhouse companies of the Web 2.0 generation and getting rich, while failing to use his influence for the bigger issue of software / knowledge freedom.
Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.
At first I thought it was simply old friends giving each other a hard time but soon it was clear that Eben had an agenda and was using the venue to make his point. I don’t have any problem with a speaker having a point of view and arguing it vigorously, but when it turns personal and vitriolic they’ve clearly cross the line.
I think this was clear to the audience as well. How else could you intrepret statements like:
1 You spend to much time with your billionaire friends
2 You’ve wasted the past 10 years trying to make money while freedoms are under attack
3 This Web 2.0 stuff is silly, ‘thermal noise’
R0ml's talk that I missed 
The first was on “Preventing Code”, about how businesses treat code like some sort of dangerous weapon that their employees must be prevented from using at all costs.
After talking about the fallacy of rhetoric in modern business language, the remainder of the session was dedicated to replacing our modern business language with words from antiquity, almost all of which have meanings very close to what we want. I’m not surprised that most of the words come from the literary (as in books) domain. We are, after all, writing and publishing software. Shamefully, no one recorded this session. I couldn’t even attempt to do it justice here. [I COULDN'T AGREE MORE!!!!]
Who says the English language doesn’t have a proper word for what we mean by free software? Liberal Software.
Related posts:
Unconference.net
