Get on the (Symbian) boat
Wed, 10/02/2010 - 14:41 — tinouAs far as I have been able to read on the Web, Symbian has no reputation of a developper-friendly operating system. The good news is that it might change in the future. Nokia, who has recently bought it, is making it opensource, and has just opened the repository and the community website. It seems to use Mercurial, MediaWiki, and provide documentation, and that would be a good start to build a community of developers, according to this. The rest is all about communication and community management (not the least, though).
Demand #1: Freedom
Wed, 27/01/2010 - 15:06 — tinouIt may look a bit of a shortcut, but this is really what have answered Youtube's users when they have been asked what they would like to see change in the world's number one video content provider. More than anything else, maybe because of writings from mozilla officials, users want open format videos. The poll is not over yet, but at the moment I write this, roughly 25,000 people have submitted about 2,500 ideas and cast nearly 300,000 votes; the most voted idea so far (more than 6,000 liked it, less than 200 didn't) is Youtube to support Ogg/Theora/HTML5, and to only serve Flash™ videos as a fallback when the browser doesn't support "more advanced features". This idea has an enormous amount of very similar requests.
I don't know if all these voters actually are open source geeks, or if this is the sign that a very significant part of the Internet population has understood how important open formats are. While I fear the first option is the explanation, I hope that the second one is true, and I can only be happy about this strong signal being sent to Google. With lots of depressing news in the digital world about ACTA these days, this is all good news for freedom, people do care about it.
Also mentionned in the survey, the users:
Free busy bees working for Haiti
Mon, 18/01/2010 - 15:20 — tinouOnce again, I'm happy to realise how freedom of information, open knowledge, and a community can be efficient when the time comes to: After the earthquake in Haiti recently, active users of OpenStreetMap have set up a task force to create and update permanently a map of the devastated area that is used by search and rescue staff on the ground. A couple of companies have also provided up-to-date satellite and UAV flights pictures, that allow OSM editors all over the world to label where a building is collapsed, where a camp site has been build, which area is allocated to which of the nations involved in the SAR activities, and anything else that might be helpful to them. This information is then available to anybody, especially those at work there, for them to update on their GPS, at least of a certain model. Well, an internet access is required for that, but I believe some emergency access have been set up. Some claim the work resulting of this effort is the most up-to-date map of the area.
Google vs. China
Thu, 14/01/2010 - 12:48 — tinouSo this is the buzz of the day, Google has decided that enough is enough, no more censoring on the content of its Chinese branch websites. The original claim is that the search engines giant has detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack originating from China, resulting in the theft of Google and some other compagnies intellectual property. Then, they say that they have evidence to suggest that one of the primary goal of these attacks was accessing Gmail accounts of chinese human rights activists in USA and in Europe. And as a consequence, they choose to stop censoring what was required by the local law, and risk to have to leave China if that is not accepted. Amnesty International representative say it's a step in the good direction, and generally speaking, everybody seems to enjoy this decision (apart maybe from Chinese officials).
What I read between the lines, though, is the following:
