Greasemonkey: an Historical Perspective
The latest happenings in the Greasemonkey world inspired me, finally, to finish the essay I’ve been working on.
Read “Greasemonkey: an Historical Perspective”
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Open Source Lessons for Digital Media
I’ve written a new essay about what digital media companies can learn from the open source movement:
When I was growing up in the 1980’s, copy protection was a big deal in the software world. It was widely assumed that if people could freely create perfect digital copies of their software and distribute them to others, it would be impossible for software companies to make any money. As a result, loopy schemes ranging from non-standard floppy disk formats to hardware dongles (hanging in ever-lengthening daisy chains off your serial port) were dreamed up by vendors desperate to protect their revenues.
My other, equally clear memory from this period is the frustration experienced by users who had legally acquired a software product only to struggle with the willful crippling that its creator had inflicted on it. Since vendors were distributing floppy disks (and later CD-ROMs) that they had intentionally broken in order to prevent copying, it is hardly surprising that things went awry with unnerving regularity. It was often impossible to make backup copies, despite the fact that PC hardware back then was far less reliable than it is today. And God forbid you should upgrade to a new computer; moving all your existing software onto it was the stuff of nightmares.
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Bring Back the Browser Wars?
I’ve written a longish essay about the potential of Mozilla Firefox to supplant Microsoft Windows as the standard platform for software development.
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