Dana Blankenhorn

Firefox 4 is da bomb Well worth waiting for. Get it now at http://mzl.la/hfDzbM . You'll be glad you did.

Notice that Walgreens paid only $409 m for Drugstore.com yet calls the deal dilutive http://tcrn.ch/hPCoHA When Internet touches Meat Space its value shrivels like bacon.

Hatin' on GPLv3

One of the most controversial stories I covered at ZDNet was the update of the General Public License (GPL) from GPLv2 to GPLv3.

The process was directed by free software advocates. Their aim was to close “loopholes” in the GPL that let companies use GPL code but not give people access to it, simply by putting it in hardware. It was a process called “Tivoization” because so many video hardware outfits were using Linux and supporting Digital Rights Management (DRMs), the restriction on what you can do with content.

It's a bit like the President's health care law. They hated on it before it passed, and they still hate on it, even if the rest of us don't understand it. Never mind that the result is clearer and (from a user's perspective) more free than what came before. There are still more GPLv2 than v3 programs.

Apple, which made a grand bargain with the content companies on behalf of DRM when it introduced the iPod, and wound up reaping the benefits in terms of a near-monopoly on online music sales, is among the most aggressive of the GPLv3 haters. So when Samba, the open source project that provides interoperability among Linux, Windows and Mac files, decided to switch to GPLv3, it should have surprised no one that Apple decided to back away from it.

Yet some were surprised.

Tyler Perry's Sweet Auburn

While riding back from the Georgia Capitol yesterday  I detoured (as I often do) past the King Center.

What I noticed is that there was a bigger crowd by the MLK Birth Home than at the center itself, where Dr. King and Coretta are now buried, side-by-side. And the atmosphere at the home was different as well. It was festive, alive, without the reverence found at the grave site.

There's a reason for that. With the passage of time we see, not just the tragedy of Dr. King's death, but the wonder of the life preceding it, and we're curious about it.

The home itself isn't much of a much. It dates from the time of my own home. It's a two-story wood structure very similar in design to many of the infill homes going into my own neighborhood.

So I get this idea.

Paul Ryan, Deficit Chickenhawk

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) loves strutting about claiming to be a deficit hawk. He hates deficits, he claims. He demands we cut spending because we're broke.

Yet when Epic Systems Corp., which is based in his home state of Wisconsin, passed around a letter recently demanding that the VA's move to replace its open source VistA system with an open source process be halted, Ryan signed it. The letter claimed, laughably, that the benefits of a commercial system had not been given "appropriate consideration.”

This is bullshit. Commercial systems got plenty of consideration. It was called AHLTA – the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application.

Based entirely on proprietary technology, AHLTA has been a big, long, frustrating failure. Meanwhile VistA, which was shared as “public record” a decade before anyone knew what open source was, has been giving our heroes the most efficient care anywhere for 30 years.

That's a market test, Congressman. You remember the market, don't you? You once claimed to be a supporter of it.

A Nice Ride for a Good Cause

One blessing of freelancing is that, if the weather's nice and spirit moves, you can just go out and take a bike ride.

That's what I did this morning. For a good cause.

It was called Georgia Rides to the Capitol. It started from the MARTA station by my house. It ran to the State Capitol, about five miles away. It had a police escort. It was 70 degrees and sunny.I'd already blogged about AT&T. I couldn't resist.

I thought I would be among the oldest participants. Boy, was I wrong. I haven't seen that much gray hair since my last college reunion. It was gratifying. I felt like one of the young 'uns.

Not that there weren't young 'uns. One couple pulled a trailer where their two-year old sat like a queen on her throne, playing with a video game. A 20-something couple rode on a tandem, both in street clothes, both sans helmets, both with flowing hair running down their backs. "Hey," I wanted to say. "My youth called. It wants my hair back." A man near my own age pedaled a heavy street bike, without a helmet, wearing a shell sweater over a dress shirt and tie.

My one regret is that I never asked any of my fellow riders to snap a few shots of me, so you'd see how spiffy I look in my riding togs. The picture to the left is a few years old.

After the Carrier Death Spiral, Google

A “carrier death spiral” is what some are calling AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile. (Others disagree.)

The merger raises the spectre of a renewed monopoly (as though the former SBC hadn't moved decisively in that direction years ago). The deal will take a year to clear although AT&T officials insist they have the stroke with the bureaucracy to get it done.

And they do. That's the problem.

I can't tell you how many trillions of dollars American consumers have paid over the last decades, over and above their real value, for wired and wireless bits, thanks to monopolistic practices we foresaw in the mid-1990s, tried to deal with, and then saw politics unravel.

The whole idea of the government, from the beginning, was to separate the infrastructure from the service. Thanks to a compliant Bush Administration, and Clinton appointees who were outmaneuvered, the Bell operating companies overthrew that deal. This led to the merger mania which now sees us with only three “choices” – AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – for most people just two of the three, and for others just one.

Libya is Not Iraq

I'm pretty disappointed by the idiots who either want to re-fight Iraq with Libya, use Libya to justify Iraq, or change their minds about America's use of force in the world, demanding a "declaration of war" here after approving Bush's lies 8 years ago.

The situation is entirely different.

Let's remember our goal. It is, and always has been, to assist democracy and freedom. We believe prosperous liberal democracies don't go to war against one another. They battle through other means, economic means, in which both sides can actually win, rather than both sides losing.

We went into Afghanistan because Al Qaeda attacked us, and because we believed the Taliban were giving them safe haven. Killing Bin Laden remains our primary goal there.

Why The Times Must Go Down Hard

The New York Times pay wall plan is founded on a lie.

The lie is that mass market consumers must pay big bucks to fund quality content.

This was not true in the age of print. What you paid for the Times that landed on your doorstep last Sunday was not for the writing and editing. You paid for the cost of getting that paper from the plant to you. Nothing else. Not the marketing, not the ads, not the executive salaries, certainly not for the editorial. That was an afterthought.

The proportion of a newspaper's budget going into editorial has never been more than 8% of the total. The rest went for distribution, production, marketing, ad sales, and executive salaries. So how then do you justify a big fee when distribution is essentially free and when the customers are coming to you?

The Fork or the Money

Open source began without much money behind it. So, too, did Microsoft.

But something happened along the way. I call it second-mover advantage. Microsoft took over from Digital Research Corp. (ask your father what CP/M meant back in his day), Google took over from Yahoo. Oracle emerged after Ashton-Tate collapsed.

The difference between first-mover and second-mover advantage is that the second-mover has a Clue. They know what the key to the business is. They can scale. The industry grows exponentially, again-and-again. It matures.