Posts tagged as:

open source

Roboto and the open source red herring

October 20, 2011

I largely agree with John Gruber and many others than Roboto is a bit of an ungainly beast of a font, although it’s much better than the hideous thing it replaces. But I think that John is missing the mark in this statement: This idea that designers who favor iOS criticize Android for being poorly [...]

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On Google’s “openness”

July 18, 2011

If you want to start a flame war, post something about whether Google is truly “open” or not. Nothing in the world of technology – not even comments on the state of Steve Jobs’ health – is more likely to get people shouting at each other. Amongst sections of the Mac community, Google gets a [...]

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Why free software will remain a niche, in a nutshell

February 7, 2011

Steven J Vaughan-Nichols on The new Debian Linux: Irrelevant? | ZDNet: “For example, the default Debian distributions won’t include any proprietary firmware binary files… If, as is likely if you’re using a laptop or a PC with high-end graphics and you find you’re running into hardware problems, the Debian installation program should alert you the problem. That’s [...]

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How efficient is open source development?

April 22, 2010

Mark Shuttleworth, who probably knows more about open source development than most, on the open source development process: “There is a myth that being open is necessarily more efficient and cheaper, but there are no hordes of people showing up to do the hard stuff,” Shuttleworth says. “Occasionally wonderful, magical things happen — really incredible [...]

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Create things people want to own

April 5, 2010

Sometimes, I start writing a blog post only to find that someone else has said what I was about to say, only with more brevity and style. In this case, it’s Joe Clark, talking about the open source community’s “sky is falling in” act about the iPad: “This was the weekend those of us with [...]

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Daring Fireball’s wishful thinking

November 19, 2009

I totally understand where John Gruber is coming from with his post on “The OS Opportunity“. The problem is that there’s a whole lot of wishful thinking in there. First of all, go read John’s post. Rather than try and summarise here and potentially mischaracterise what he’s saying, you just go read it. Back? Good. [...]

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Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu: A Tale of Three Operating Systems

April 11, 2009

Joe Wilcox picks up on a comment that I made on his post about Windows 7 and its relationship to the Mac: “As you know, Joe, I’m a Mac to Linux switcher (with over 20 years Mac use under my belt). But I’m also a tinkerer who’s curious about OS’s, so I’ve been running Windows [...]

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How much of a success is open source?

August 16, 2008

How much of a success is open source? In his musings on open source, and how ideas cross the chasm, Alan Patrick ponders the origin story of open source, and how it relates to a particular brand of utopianism. “The problem of course, is that many of these Utopians are the dreamers and idealists who [...]

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Well now this is interesting

July 22, 2008

< p>WordPress app for iPhone: “Robust but simple to use, the WordPress for iPhone Open Source application allows you to create and edit content on your WordPress blog(s) with support for offline use.” Can an application that comes wrapped in a DRM layer even when it’s free (as in beer) and the source code is [...]

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