Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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Lawrence Lessig reports that free software licenses have been upheld.  According to Lessig, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has said that

CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

The case in question has now been sent back to the District Court to determine whether there is grounds for an injunction to be granted to the plaintiff.

Although many businesses have treated Open Source code with respect for some time, this ruling adds teeth to Open Source licenses.  Violate the rights granted to you in an Open Source license, and you may land in court!  This should provide a tremendous boost to businesses like Protecode, who make tools for help track and manage the pedigree of code used by developers in their applications.

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Today we started off with Craigslist’s decision to ban VoIP and prepaid cellular numbers from their system.  We had Cory Andrews and Garrett Smith from VoIP Supply on the line to talk about it with us. Cory had written a blog post for the VoIP Supply Blog yesterday about this.

Generally there was sympathy for Craigslist, but consensus that the approach is too blunt an instrument. 

We also tried to talk about Facebook Open Platform.  Yesterday the API infrastructure, the FBML parser, the FQL parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags were released.  However, there was little enthusiasm for this topic on the call. 

On the call: Julie Salgado, Hudson Barton, Don Eidse, Andy Abramson, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Ari Rabban, Dave Brown, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Warren Bent, James Body, Neal Saferstein, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams, Garrett Smith, Cory Andrews, Alon Cohen

Enjoy the conversation

 

 Squawk Box Jun 3 [37:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This morning we’d originally intended to have Jajah CEO Trevor Healy join us. Jajah had to reschedule, so we’ll have them tomorrow instead.

We started off with Facebook’s plan to open source the Facebook Platform. This is being characterized as a nearly inevitable response to OpenSocial. The claimed effect is to allow nearly any social network to become Facebook compatible, and to create a cross platform API for apps. Facebook will apparently opensource FBML, FQL, FJS, and the FB API.

The real question will be how is it licensed, who owns changes to the tools, and how is it administered.

Yesterday at the All Things D conference, Microsoft showed video of the new Windows Multi-touch interface. Unlike Apple’s multi-touch, it actually works on the screen — pinches, squeezes and so on on a tablet size device. We talked about whether it was as revolutionary as some people seemed to think, and how Apple might respond. And, we talked about the potential contradiction that was implied by Microsoft VP Steve Sinofsky’s tight lighted approach to Windows 7 communications.

A couple of people had installed the Nokia N95 V20 firmware update. People felt that it was faster, and had new features.

And finally, we chatted about the New York Times and their announcement of an API. The Times intent is to allow programmers to easily mash up the content with their applications. Nick Desbarats from Choicebot was on the line, and he was very clear that Choicebot would find the Times API valuable.

On the call: Dave Brown, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Frank Abrams, Nick Desbarats, Peter Childs, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Mark Hewitt, Jeanette Fisher, Jeb Brilliant, Bill Volk and James Body.

 

 Squawk Box May 28 [35:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

WorxBox is …

The Asterisk Server with the Worx®! The goal of the Worxbox® project is to provide a production quality Open-Source Unified Communications Server that’s easy to build, configure and manage. WorxBox® installs all the software needed to deploy a fully functional Asterisk® based PBX and creates a basic configuration which can then be easily optimized to meet the requirements of almost any business.

WorxBox® is a no-compromise, next-generation phone system that can scale to support several hundred users, but it doesn’t stop there. Worxbox® also integrates Asterisk® with a comprehensive suite of supporting and complementary web, messaging, networking and business productivity modules. In fact, for many small businesses Worxbox® may be the only server they need!

Learn more here.  And if you’re so inclined, make a contribution.  I am sure Jeremy would welcome the support.

Bryan Richards, editor-in-chief of VoIP Magazine.com, has a go at Microsoft’s Unified Communications Strategy.  In main, he wonders about the value, writing:

“It’s all very interesting technology but seems a bit much to make a phone call even if it is just to leave a voice mail.”

and…

“making a phone ring when someone is at their desk is helpful, but its far from a revolution in productivity.”

It’s hard to disagree, and that’s the reason I called the announcement a damp squib. It’s the intersection of the fundamentals of presence and business processes that will provide the value that customers are looking for.  That intersection will happen in three phases:

1. implementation of presence infrastructure – the servers, etc that are capable of managing presence information.
2. automation of presence setting – relieving human beings of the necessity to set and review presence status.  If this step doesn’t happen, nobody will use presence.
3. new applications dependent on presence.

An example I know well, obviously, is the iotum relevance engine.  It performs many of the functions of a human assistant, in respect of managing telephone calls.  It is dependent on presence, and both uses and performs automated presence setting. With the presence feature (and many other sources of input) it is able to predict the relevance of a communications request, and your likelihood to want to take that call.  The fact that it can ring the correct phone is merely the icing on the cake.

Presence, by itself, is a hard sell. It doesn’t indicate anything about the users receptivity to a communications request.  It simply reflects physicality.  And that’s why presence, as implemented today, is broken.  The tragedy is that many people are turning the feature off, because their only experience of it is IM which can be as large a productivity drain as email.  Its potential is still waiting in the wings.

Microsoft’s announcements, while interesting, are about infrastructure and automation.  They’re not yet about changing the world, and, won’t be able to even begin until late 2007.  If you’re interested in experiencing what that world can be like today, check out offerings from Communigate, or from their hosted partner, Versature, here in Ottawa.  Versature will also be making the iotum Relevance Engine available to their customers shortly.