Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
The Open Source Definition sets ten criteria a licence must satisfy for OSI certification. The approved licences sit along one axis: strong copyleft, weak copyleft, permissive.
Read moreAn application server with an object database and a content management framework keep content, presentation and workflow separate. Technical notes on Zope and the CMF, and on why the Open Source approach holds up against enterprise products.
Read moreTechnical notes on the Insight Toolkit, the C++ library funded by the National Library of Medicine under the Visible Human Project: template architecture, dataflow pipeline, CMake build and BSD licence.
Read moreWhy a content management platform should treat multi-channel publishing as a chain of XML transformations, and what it actually takes to get there in 2002.
Read moreThe dual-licence model of MySQL, Qt and Berkeley DB rests on the GPL's reciprocity. A technical anatomy of a 2002 mechanism.
Read moreThe questions put to the Pisa panel already have a measurable answer in 2002: filed licences, foundation governance and third-party market share, not opinion.
Read moreTechnical notes on using Linux, Apache and GPL licensing inside a technology park near Pisa, in the spring of 2002.
Read moreBash 2.05a is a free rewrite of the Bourne shell that extends POSIX.2. Writing portable scripts means choosing when to lean on the extensions and when to stop at the standard.
Read moreWithin a few years R has become a practical tool for analysing high-dimensional gene-expression data. Technical notes on why a free statistical language fits microarrays, and on what the Bioconductor project is trying to standardise.
Read moreJabber routes messages and presence between independent servers via dialback, and bridges the closed networks with transports. Technical notes on a streaming-XML protocol in 2001.
Read moreAn editorial archive with several editors needs explicit publication states and per-transition permissions. DCWorkflow, in Zope CMF, models this as a state machine, kept out of the content type code.
Read moreWhat it takes to serve a high-traffic editorial site on a fully open-source stack: object database, acquisition, page templates and scaling with ZEO.
Read moreBetween 2000 and 2001 the rights to Python changed hands three times. The founding of the Python Software Foundation closes a season of fragmented licences and shows why a project's governance weighs as much as its code.
Read moreIn February 2001 Apache serves nearly 60% of the sites Netcraft found. How the 1.3 prefork works, what the Multi-Processing Modules in the 2.0 development tree change, and why the licence and the governance weigh as much as the code.
Read moreThe network services a small office LAN needs already exist as mature open-source projects. The hard part is making them coexist on one administrable machine.
Read moreDescribe the tables once, in a metadata file, and generate the DDL, queries and forms from there: what holds and what stays manual.
Read moreThe new Zend Engine separates parsing from execution: what actually changes in server-side work, and what it leaves uncovered.
Read moreThe 2.2 kernel keeps everything in kernel space yet loads and unloads code while the machine is running — a middle way relative to the 1992 microkernel argument.
Read moreIn amateur packet radio the AX.25 link layer carries no routing at all: incompatible network protocols live on top of it. Technical notes on how a Linux node terminates and translates between them on a single machine.
Read moreFree software is defined by the permissions it grants over source code, not by its price. What the four freedoms guarantee and why copyleft makes them inherited.
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