Patrick McCormick

The Town of Brookline has selected a proposal for a public private partnership to build a municipal wireless network and scheduled a public hearing for Monday April 10 at 7:30 PM in the community room in the public safety building.

For the last eight months I have had the pleasure of working at town hall on muni Wi-Fi and some other IT projects. A combination of forward thinking ciitizens, dedicated staff, and enthusiastic elected officials has fueled the wireless initiative that promises to be the first comprehensive muni Wi-Fi network in the area. The town hopes to have the network up by mid fall.

The multipurpose network will provide residents and local businesses with a new pipe for broadband services while offering free community access in commercial districts, parks, and public housing, as well as for municipal and public safety workers. The network will be open, allowing numerous providers to compete for wireless broadband customers.

The selected propsoal which is still up for final negotiations, is from Galaxy Internet Services (a MA based ISP) and NeoReach (behind WAZ networks including Tempe, NV). The network will utilize equipment from SkyPilot that offers simultaneous use of 2.4, 4.9, and 5.8 GHz frequencies for Wi-Fi, public safety, and backhaul (respectively).

In yet another exciting court decision (well perhaps the excitement comes from the anticipating the impact rather than reading the actual court decision) the Creative Commons license has been upheld in a court decision in the Netherlands.

The decision does not involve a book, paper, song, or anything some of us might have expected, but rather some personal photographs posted by a semi-celebrity on Flickr and reprinted by a Dutch gossip magazine.

So perhaps this case is not merely a critical affirmation of the viability of an alternative intellectual property scheme but alas, also a reflection of our pop culture driven attention deficit disordered world. But then I guess as far as legal precedents go, the inclusion of a celebrity, some photos, and a tabloid, could help to fuel public awareness.

The code long ago proved its technical endurance and in recent years has made headlines with investors but until this past week has been largely untested in the courts. But this spring advocates of open source intellectual property already have two cases to celebrate.

First comes news that the Free Software Foundation has been successful in a requested court dismissal of the Wallace complaint. Groklaw provides complete coverage on the case and eloquently observes:

>So, the end result is, the GPL went to court, and the judge not only upheld it, he said this:

[T]he GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.

>I’m sure that was not Mr. Wallace’s intention, to strenghten the GPL. But he did. (GL)