As more and more people are switching to Firefox, this extension is the perfect tool for the web developer.

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox and Mozilla, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

See also:
Check the blog, see the documentation and visit the forums .

See also:
Mozilla Firefox for Rapid Web Development
Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox

Danese Cooper about the MS OS licence move

The big news today at EuroOSCON is the fact that Microsoft has posted new source licenses, and a couple of them might actually be OSD-compliant!!

Jason Matusow's Blog points to Shared Source Page for more info.

Lisbon Agenda and Open Source
Paul Everitt, Zope Europe Association

The EU's Lisbon Agenda calls for European planning to produce the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010. Indicators show, though, that U.S. hegemony is increasing in the primary software sector. Even FLOSS seems to start in Europe and finish in the U.S.

Via the Silent Penguin

See the presentation
and Paul's blog post

Adelphi Charter on creativity, innovation and intellectual property

We call upon governments and the international community to adopt these principles.

1. Laws regulating intellectual property must serve as means of achieving creative, social and economic ends and not as ends in themselves.
2. These laws and regulations must serve, and never overturn, the basic human rights to health, education, employment and cultural life.
3. The public interest requires a balance between the public domain and private rights. It also requires a balance between the free competition that is essential for economic vitality and the monopoly rights granted by intellectual property laws.
4. Intellectual property protection must not be extended to abstract ideas, facts or data.
5. Patents must not be extended over mathematical models, scientific theories, computer code, methods for teaching, business processes, methods of medical diagnosis, therapy or surgery.
6. Copyright and patents must be limited in time and their terms must not extend beyond what is proportionate and necessary.
7. Government must facilitate a wide range of policies to stimulate access and innovation, including non-proprietary models such as open source software licensing and open access to scientific literature.
8. Intellectual property laws must take account of developing countries' social and economic circumstances.
9. In making decisions about intellectual property law, governments should adhere to these rules:

See also:
News and Resources
Open Content Alliance

I put these two excerpts side to side because I think that Jon demonstrates here something which got missed in the whole open source = proprietary discussion. It's not about the source, it's about how your users (I don't like that word though) get the most value out of a software.

Open source is a big leap forward and had the benefit of changing how we looked at software and software companies. But as long as the software was used as product - on the client's server - the benefits for the user were still marginal.

With software as service and the "network" model, the value for the user is much higher. Naturally not all problems are resolved yet, but the steep improvements and the extraordinary blossoming of cool (software) projects (Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Maps, Audioscrobbler/last.fm, Odeo to name but a few well known ones) in the last two years let's me get quite excited about future developments.


User innovation toolkits and continous improvement

Discussions of software as a service tend to focus on its obvious benefits: zero-footprint deployment and seamless incremental upgrades. Less noticed, but equally valuable, is the constant flow of interaction data. The back-and-forth chatter between an application and its host environment can be a drag when connectivity is marginal and it precludes offline use. But when this communication flows freely, it paints a moving picture that shows how individuals and groups are using the software.

The changing cathedral and the evolving bazaar

The bazaar is learning that fit and finish, coupled with pervasive consistency, are worthy engineering challenges to which its tactics of open and scalable collaboration can fruitfully be applied.

Five hundred years ago the cathedral and the bazaar were divided cultures. But this network we're all building and using is a machine for cultural transmission and transformation. So I regard nothing about past behavior as a certain predictor of the future.

Der Heise Zeitschriften Verlag hat mitgeteilt, Ende Januar 2006 ein Konferenz unter dem Motto "Open Source meets Business" zu veranstalten, welche ganz dem geschäftlichen Einsatz von Open-Source-Software gewidmet sein soll. Dazu sollen in mehreren gleichzeitig ablaufenden, sowie nach Branchen und Einsatzbereichen gegliederten Tracks Anwender aus Unternehmen ihre Open Source Lösungen präsentieren, wobei Business-Anwendungen, die auf Open Source Basis basieren, im Vordergrund stehen sollen.

Via ifOSS und Dini-Jahrestagung zu e-learning

Digitale Allmend

• Geschichte, Konflikte und Lizenzen: Blick auf die digitale Allmend (20.10.05)
• Wissen in der digitalen Allmend: Software, Wikipedia und Blogs (03.11.05)
• Kultur in der digitalen Allmend: Podcasting, Creative Commons und Musik (17.11.05)
• Diskussion - Was tun? Wie weiter? Der Weg zur Digitalen Allmend (01.12.05)

Joe Kraus from Jotspot: There's been a lot of hype around open source, and there are people who believe that open web means open source and anything less than open source is not open web. I don't believe this. Open source is a really important movement—it's powerful in many ways, and we certainly benefit from it and contribute to it—but there are also a lot of interesting examples of late that take a different view of open web. These examples point to open data, not open source.

Take Flickr: Its code is closed, but there are enough APIs in and out of it that you have this tremendous ability to tinker, even if you don't control it. JotSpot, too, is very much an open-data-style service. Just as with Flickr, there are tons of APIs in and out. You can manipulate content inside of JotSpot even if you don't have source-code control.

To me, open web really refers to how tinkerable it is. It's really a spectrum of tinkerability. Some people believe the only way you can tinker is via open source, but I believe the new trend (especially in web-based services that are hosted by somebody else) is to facilitate tinkerability even without open source. That's why I think Google is not actually totally closed: They offer APIs into their service. Now, they could offer more ...

And is the shift due to the shortage of big open source thinkers?

Anyway if you have ideas to make KAYWA weblogs more tinkerable, let me know.

Democratizing Content Publication with Coral

CoralCDN is a peer-to-peer content distribution network that allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a cheap broadband Internet connection.Volunteer sites that run CoralCDN automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it. Publishing through CoralCDN is as simple as making a small change to the hostname in an object’s URL; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to nearby participating cache nodes, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the origin web server. One of the system’s key goals is to avoid creating hot spots that might dissuade volunteers and hurt performance. It achieves this through Coral, a latency-optimized hierarchical indexing infrastructure based on a novel abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table, or DSHT.

Via Jon Udell

Identity 2.0 (the movie)

As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, these systems will provide the scalable, user-centric mechanism for authenticating and managing real-world identities online, enabling truly distinct and portable Internet identities.

See also:
Internet Identity Workshop
Identity 2.0 Weblog