Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance

Talk about being a victim of your own success. Twitter has become my social networking tool of choice, but I wish the service were more reliable. It's just flaked for what seems like the tenth time in the last month, and now only displays the above message when you try and access it. You might regard that as the "this page intentionally left blank" of the web 2.0 world.

Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.

I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.

Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.

EU Slam Microsoft with Further Fine

The saga continues. The European Commission have fought Microsoft to ensure that, in Europe at least, they have to play by the rules rather than making them up as they go along. Unlike the US government (which not only refused to declare them a monopoly despite their domination of the desktop but also failed to properly enforce the rather tame sanctions they imposed), the EU has repeatedly told Microsoft to stop behaving in an anti-competitive way.

The latest action, in which the Commission sued Microsoft for failing to comply with previous antitrust decisions, has resulted in a €899 m ($1.35bn) fine. Though it has only led to a 12c drop in the stock this represents about a tenth of Microsoft's annual profits, and may finally give the company reason to think seriously about complying with court rulings rather than ignoring them.

This is the first time in 50 years that such action has been taken by the EU, because every other company losing such an action chose to comply with the spirit and the letter of the decisions.

Microsoft faces further trouble with the EU, which recently started a new investigation into Microsoft business practices relating to their dominance in the word processing and spreadsheet arenas, and to determine whether the company unfairly tied Internet Explorer to Windows. The recent announcement about API sharing will also come under scutiny, and the European Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, observed it's the fifth time that Microsoft has made an announcement about improving interoperability. She said "Talk is cheap. Let's wait and let's find the reality in this case. They have to deliver and implement."

Open Source Stands on GNU's Shoulders

It's nice to see Bruce Perens crediting Richard Stallman with being right about software freedom back in 1983. Stallman might be less than a diplomat, as he promotes his views uncompromisingly, but whatever you think of him persaonlly there's no denying that he is a man of vision.

I bought my first GNU t-shirt at the UK Unix User Group conference in (I think) 1988, and have supported free software and open source ever since. The dinosaurs can't see it but there is a groundswell of change that's growing and will, much sooner than most people anticipate, change the economic and social order of things.

Don't worry, the determined capitalists will find a way to steal it away and use it for their own gain. By the way, happy tenth birthday, OSI.