But the UAV-as-weapon concern is persistent, and many people have asked whether we, by making the technology available and easy to use, might be inadvertently be helping our enemies.

The topic around which the most discussion encircled was open source, and boy were there divergent views among the week’s ensemble. MBW regulars Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko took allegiance to cutthroat capitalism, while host Leo Laporte and the reigning jokester Merlin Mann took too trumpeting openness everywhere and hippie love for all.

"Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide..."

"An objection I've had to many programming books and web sites is that they don't make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, Open Source and open technology trends continue to swing in one direction (up and to the right). Along this ever-growing open technology spectrum lie various projects and companies who hope to gain a competitive advantage through some type of open collaboration initiative.

And with this Roomba, we run in to another Proprietary Agreement. ... Wasn't there some quote, maybe from Ben Franklin, about trading essential liberty for clean floors?

"The Association for Progressive Communications has an article / interview on how communication technologies can be used for development." (and so, how free software could be used)

"...In the brief time available to me I have only been able to describe informally and in a brief way the benefits that open approaches knowledge can bring our society..."