Roboscoble does PlanetPlanet

Microsoft's RoboScoble (aka http://msreadr.com/), uses PlanetPlanet as an aggregator, running on FreeBSD and Apache.

Huh?

| 17 Jul 2006 | #

Sage - RSS Aggregation

Started using Sage, a plugin for Firefox, for RSS feed aggregation. That's only for my Windows desktop - under Linux I'm still deciding between Blam! and Liferea.

| 11 May 2005 | #

Firefox non-free?!?!

This article interviewing rms pointed me to this fsf page which suggests that Firefox is non-free. The key point being that the pre-built binaries have something called TalkBack included which is bug-reporting software. I hadn't heard about this before - this is a real shame.

| 01 Apr 2005 | #

shared source cluelessness

Rhetoric from an ex-Microsoft employee. I wouldn't normally mention it, but since I made reference to Shared Source here recently, I thought I'd better followup.

Steven makes points along the line of revenue. That's not the main point. Average Joe is going to continue to buy his Windows OS via a shrinkwrap because of the assurances that buying Microsoft gives him. It's the same as Red Hat - take Fedora and package it - that's RHEL. Why do people buy free software? The assurances and the paid support. MS would not lose in this scenario by embracing open-source.

The main issue is modifiability. Being able to modify the code means fixing bugs. That's the major advantage of OSS. Being able to fix problems and guarrentee maintainability long-term.

Why doesn't my JVC video camera not work under Windows XP? It's too old, so the driver no longer ships withe the OS, and JVC don't care. This wouldn't happen with open-source.

| 31 Mar 2005 | #

MSNbots

Looking through Apache logs yields some strange things.

The host 207.46.98.82, which resolves to msnbot.msn.com, is continually hitting my website looks for free software people.

For example, in the last 24 hours here are some requested non-existant URLs:

• /person/jdub/
• /person/rsharpe
• /person/mbp/
• /person/murrayc/
• /person/msevior/
• /person/rasmus/
• /person/hp/
• /person/bdale/

Huh?

| 20 Mar 2005 | #