Stories about: Open Access

As if "openness" wasn't already the key word of the year for mobile communications, Nokia took the concept a step further Tuesday, announcing plans to create an organization called the Symbian Foundation, which will make the Symbian mobile operating system an open platform, with licenses to be offered royalty-free.

Largely due to the continued dumb statements and actions of a few apparently PR-challenged carriers, the network neutrality issue is alive and well in the United States. Since any issue like this seems to create a legislative void that must be filled, we now have at least two network neutrality related bills for Congress to consider. If one liked legislation-based solutions, merging these bills and tossing out a bit of Federal Communications Commission make-work would not be too bad, but there would still be some questions left unanswered.

Fighting insomnia one night, all Robert Topolski wanted to do was send digital recordings of 19th-century barbershop quartet music to some friends.

iiNet has declared that the Rudd government's National Broadband Network (NBN) will be a failure with higher fees for customers, fewer ISPs and a decline in innovation and competition if the current access and regulatory regime is not "dramatically reformed".

YouTube this week unveiled new tools aimed at allowing third party Web sites to build their own YouTube capabilities by providing developers with access to the YouTube video library and underlying video hosting and streaming infrastructure.

Microsoft received plaudits and criticism for its openness efforts at the MIX08 event this week with a Microsoft official also citing an overture toward the Eclipse Foundation for open-source tooling.

This week's announcement of the Android open mobile platform by Google and dozens of other companies could provoke the kinds of industry battles seen with other Linux-based initiatives, where incumbent, established players fight newcomers.

Lawrence Lessig, who serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge, talks about Internet censorship and predicts a great battle among the defenders of free software and Microsoft -- and says it will probably be "long and bloody."

Vint Cerf says New Zealand needs to look to "open access" to the internet rather than a business model that allows domination by any one party.

It seems like everywhere you look, open standards and open formats are becoming the preferred means of delivering digital documents. XML, for one, is now the darling of the enterprise: Even Microsoft has committed to an open XML format for its upcoming Office 12 suite. But whereas static, printable document formats become more and more universally open, the picture isn't so rosy for multimedia.

The commercialisation of Linux is posing a threat to the spirit of its creation. That is the message from the president of Linux Australia Pia Waugh, who called on developers to ensure that it will not become diluted.