parker higgins

Earlier this week I read a new essay by Benjamin Mako Hill called “When Free Software Isn’t Better.” Although I found it incredibly insightful, the reaction to this essay hasn’t been universally positive. The criticism has focused on a perceived attack on the Open Source Initiative. I want to address why I think Mako has taken a stance here that’s not aligned with the OSI, and why I also think it doesn’t constitute an attack.

I came across a very interesting map by redditor JPalmz that showed the countries of the world, re-arranged to match population with land area. I thought it was very cool, so I decided to do the same thing with US states. You can see the results below, but you may need to click through to see it full size in order to read the names of the states clearly.

UPDATE: I’ve done a lot of work on these and put together a much more polished version, which is now available in a later post.

I’m heading out to the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona tomorrow through Friday. I hope to meet lots of interesting people there, talk about lots of interesting things, and hopefully write something up for these pages. Say hi if you see me there!

At the end of this month, the last patent issued by the GDR government will be expiring, the twenty year term having passed since reunification in October 1990.

The Free Culture Research Conference is happening right now at the Freie Universität in Berlin. I’m here and live-blogging it right today and tomorrow, and posting tweets and dents tagged #fcrc, and I’ll probably post some kind of wrap-up later.

Marc Hedlund, one of the founders of the personal finance tracking website Wesabe, has put up an excellent blog post about why his company lost to the more popular Mint service, in spite of being the first mover and having other important advantages. It’s not dispassionate, but it’s engaging and a fair analysis.

Nice catch by the NYTPicker, a blog devoted to “the goings-on inside the New York Times.” Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University has been quoted over 150 times in the paper by 78 different reporters, on about as many different topics.

James Grimmelmann and Paul Ohm have published “Dr. Generative Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone,” a spot-on review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet that fills in some practical blanks left by the original.

Malcom Gladwell’s New Yorker piece about his skepticism of social media’s role in social change has brought out the heavyweights, and in the past few days there’s been some really great writing about the idea. Anil Dash, in particular, raises the point that the actions of the Maker community are actually political, even though it usually just looks like they’re having fun.