Thursday, March 09, 2000

UserLand.Com members: Will you buy from Amazon?

Amazon.com: An Open Letter from Jeff Bezos. "I also strongly doubt whether our giving up our patents would really, in the end, provide much of a stepping stone to solving the bigger problem."

News.Com: Amazon CEO calls for patent reform. "Amazon's patents have raised the ire of Net advocates because the features the patents would protect have been widely adopted by other companies. Many advocates argue that the features are not only obvious, but Amazon's enforcement of patents for them could harm Net commerce."

AP: Amazon moves to stem patent uproar.

Tim O'Reilly comments on the Bezos letter. "One thing about a call for action in Washington is that it could be seen as just a way of shifting the focus away from Amazon and onto the PTO."

An open letter to Doc Searls.

I got positive emails from Doc and Tim on the Tuesday night patent discussion at Esther's, so I sent an email to Kevin saying let's go ahead. If you're going to be in Phoenix next week, let's get together and talk. I probably will ask the question at the Web Applications panel as well. "Do any of you guys have patents we should know about?"

Kate Adams: "I sent Amazon a brief e-mail this morning saying I'm staying away until I either believe in the patent or some other positive outcome is reached."

Weblogs that point to the Bezos essay.

Steve Yost: Take It Offline XML-RPC Interface. "Take It Offline is written in Perl and lives on a Solaris box. Connected XML-RPC clients include one in San Francisco using VBScript on NT, and another in Paris using Perl on Linux."

Today's new feature for Weblogs.Com is the Recently Updated Weblogs panel on the home page. It shows your favorite weblogs in the order they were last udpated. To add a log to your favorites, click on its checkbox, then click on the Favorite button. Screen shot.

Wired: "Arizona's online voting experiment may have started smoothly, but it's becoming a bumpy ride."

My.UserLand.Com: Iraqi News Update.

USA Today: Could Linux outdo Windows? "What makes Linux different is that it's part of the Internet culture. It's essentially being built by a community," says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a general manager at IBM, who is heading the Linux movement there.

March 25: Call for templates. "We're getting ready to open another server for free Manila hosting. In reviewing the site, I was asked if there was anything I wanted to change in the initial starter site we create."

MSNBC: The rise and fall of Netscape. "If there’s a cautionary tale here, it is that you can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out," Zawinski wrote. "Software is hard. The issues aren’t that simple."

Ken MacLeod: Distributed Whiteboard API.

Tim O'Reilly responds to Amazon patent questions.

Yesterday at a meeting at Sun I heard a harrowing tale about the Microsoft CSS patent, and a patent that IBM owns for calendars displayed on computer screens. For now, it seems that patents are tools that big companies use to squeeze millions of dollars out of other big companies. But big companies use their weight to crush little companies too. Some users ask why they should care. Well, do you want to get all your software (web apps too) from big companies like Microsoft, Sun and IBM? If you do, stay ambivalent about patents. You'll eventually get your wish.

Another thing big companies do is tell harrowing tales to CEOs of small companies. I'm well-practiced at receiving these stories. I tell them my story about buying a sailboat and cruising the Mediterranean, perhaps stopping off to work on pottery every once in a while.

More data from the Sun meeting. Unbeknownst to me, part of Sun has embraced XML-RPC. Unless corporate FUD kicks in, there will be a new server that will make some Frontier users quite happy! (And some Sun users too.)

Attention please: The Last Page of the Internet.

"Enjoy the rest of your life."