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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about hackers and what they do.

The term “hacker” has two quite different meanings. Some people are proud of being hackers, and they mean that they are clever programmers rather than computer vandals. Others, sadly, use skills – or sometimes just programs that other cleverer people have put together – to break into computers and generally cause problems.

Read on for my speaking notes or pull the podcast.
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I talked today on Radio New Zealand National about the contrast between pay-for software and software that is free to use. Why would you pay for something you can get for nothing?

I’ve blogged about this before, but this radio programme has some different angles. Read on for my speaker notes, or pull the podcast.
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As Don Christie has blogged, the government is releasing the software that drives the new government web portal at newzealand.govt.nz under the General Public Licence -the GPL. That makes the portal free software.

This is a really good thing for several reasons. One is that the portal code becomes available for anyone to use, tweak or re-implement. And that’s entirely appropriate – we taxpayers have paid for this software to be developed, why shouldn’t we have access to it?

But the main reason this is so important is that it shows the government getting into step with many other players in the field. Free and open source software is the norm for infrastructure software – look at the Apache webserver, look at Firefox, look at Linux, look at just about every program that makes the Internet work. Here in New Zealand our domain name registry released its registry software under the GPL.

That’s right, without free and open source software there would be no Internet. That’s not just empty rhetoric – lots of companies tried to build internets – remember Prodigy and Compuserve? But the open Internet, built using common, open standards and open source software, eclipsed all the others.

The government is keen to use the Internet to suit its purposes, and to suit ours as well. This way, it’s putting something back. Good on it.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about being in Geneva at an international standards meeting. There’s a lot of passionate and engaged people here. Read on for my speaking notes. (more…)

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Foo Camp, a technology camp in Warkworth. I talked about it today on Radio New Zealand National – read on for my speaking notes. (more…)

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about Free Software and how this is a different concept from Open Source.

Yes, there are important distinctions between these two. Free Software is sometimes taken to mean software which is free of charge under some circumstances, but the phrase really refers to software that carries certain freedoms with it – “free” as in unencumbered.

Read on for my speaking notes.
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