The Backpage

Open source... A short article on a study by the Open Source Security Foundation and a Harvard Innovation Science lab outlines some of the reasons why people work on open source projects. Head of the list is because they enjoy it... so no surprises there. Money also makes the list but is a lot further down.

In a case of the Government meeting its own GOAL the front end and documentation for the NZ COVID Tracer app has been released under the Affero General Public License (AGPL). That's the license that Google doesn't like so we can rest assured that it won't be re-purposed and sold back to us... Anyway, good start and kudos to the Ministry of Health. Now if there was only a way you could be convinced to drop your unhealthy relationship with Microsoft, stop sending so many taxpayer dollars offshore and use them instead to provide health services to New Zealanders by New Zealanders.

I see in Stuff that there are a number of US State and Federal officials going after Facebook for alleged monopolistic behaviour. Colour me surprised. Facebook and other members of the 'Frightful Five' have been accused of a significant amount of this behaviour and there is enough evidence that it has occurred... To date only Microsoft has actually been convicted and were punished by 'a slap on the wrist' according to the plaintiffs. What they were required to do was share their APIs with third parties to allow interoperability but in effect it only allowed people to call windows functions, and couldn't be used to create competing products. Hold that thought as you read on...

Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of 'Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy' (available on Amazon, of course, but I suggest you buy it from your local bookseller instead) runs a blog called BIG... and his latest entry concerns the purchase of Slack by Salesforce which he sees as a defensive move by two multinationals to stave off the total monopolisation of the market by a third multinational called, you guessed it, Microsoft.

Our very own Tim McNamara of Rust in Action fame has penned a short piece on Contributing to the Commons in 2020. In it he mentions Clay Shirky describing a vision of how 'companies that embraced sharing and collaboration would win'. Yeah, well, not so much it seems. On the plus side, while these large companies 'use our own interests against us', thanks to open source you can still contribute in your own way as Tim outlines.

The CEO and co-founder of KNIME has published a short piece outlining their Open Source business model. The software itself deals with data science and data analytics and the no-charge part allows you to develop and test multiple models to deal with data. Trying different things to see which works.

Some interesting news from a small US based Financial Services organisation... Rather than just pay a US$2 mill. bill for Oracle licenses they believed they weren't getting value for, they've invested in a move to MariaDB Database as a Service, SkySQL. That kind of annual Oracle license charge puts them in the 'Very Large Business or Govt. Dept. in New Zealand' category. The next question of course is if they can do it, why can't the Govt. or Big Business NZ do it as well?

A new election cycle is a good time to take stock of what has happened and what we might decide to do. In New Zealand we have a centre-left Government with a new set of technology Ministers… Megan Woods with Science, Research and Innovation and David Clark with Digital Economy and Communication.

A malicious NPM package has been identified and removed. Again.

Colour me gobsmacked. I've not heard anything like that since Microsoft's "Linux is a cancer" days nearly 20 years ago but no, here I am at a presentation by a security specialist and there it is writ large on the screen... well we can't let that go unchallenged can we :-)