August 12th, 2005
What should we give the Tuxmasters?
An interesting press release came in from the folks at Clarkson University today. (Go Golden Knights.)
It celebrated the victory of grad students Todd M. DeShane and Patricia A. Jablonski in the second TuxMasters competition, sponsored by Unisys and the OSDL. Another Clarkson team finished second.
The winning entry was a database project, a system for learning from searches of large databases to make each subsequent search faster based on the results of previous queries. It’s useful stuff.
But what really intrigued me was the prize list, which included a Sony Playstation and an iPod.
There was an unintentioned lesson here, a reminder that, because Digital Rights Management requires proprietary code, Linux and open source are being locked-out of the content arena. There is no Linux equivalent to the iPod or Playstation, nor is there likely to be.
I think that’s a lesson we should not forget, and need to deal with.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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