free software
Some Open-Source Software for Your Delectation
I have made a thing, and pushed it out into the world. Well, really, this is me pushing it out into the world, because nobody will have noticed it before now, and with this, there’s a chance they might.
A couple of months ago Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced the existence of JSON Feed, a new syndication format to sit alongside RSS and Atom; but using JavaScript Object Notation or JSON, instead of XML.
They invited people to write parsers and formatters and so on for it, and I quickly realised that no-one had yet written one in Java. As far as I can tell that is still the case. Or at least, if they have, they haven’t made it public yet.
No-one, that is, but me, as I have written just such a thing: a JSON Feed parsing library, written in Java. I’m calling it Pertwee. That’s the product page at my company site (more on which later). It’s open-source, and can be found at Github
As software projects go, it’s not that exciting. But it is the first open-source project that I’ve released. I hope someone might find some use for it.
Software patents: dead in Europe
In other good news, over on BoingBoing, Cory is telling us that Euro software patents are dead:
The European Parliament voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive.The bill was reportedly rejected because, politicians said, it pleased no-one in its current form.
Responding to the rejection the European Commission said it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal.
This is excellent news, though as Cory goes on to say,
Software patents have been staked through the heart before, but they keep rising from the grave. There’s too much monopoly rent waiting to be extracted by anti-competitive companies for them to simply give up and go home. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
A year or so ago the number one or two hit on Google for “software patents” was an article by an old friend of mine, John Gray, who is a Patent Attorney, in favour of them. With well-reasoned arguments, as I recall. Sadly the article appears to have gone now, though links to it remain. Such is one of the weaknesses of the web, unfortunately, when you can’t trust (some) publishers to keep their URLs pointing at something.
Update: asajeffrey found a mailing list post that, if not John’s article that I was thinking of, certainly discusses the same ideas. Thanks, Alan. Note that I am not the “Martin” referred to in that post.