Via the blog of old Well pal Bruce Umbaugh I learned of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new publication “The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music.” It does a great job of picking apart the breezy claims of several leading music services. People want to be freed from the hassle of DRM, and these services know it – that’s why they make the overblown statements that the EFF has so nicely debunked.

Humor services provider The Onion has moved the back-end of their extensive, and presumably extremely high-traffic, website to Drupal as of August 30th. It’s not clear what they were using before, but I believe it was homebuilt PHP stuff. I’ll miss playing with their old remotely exploitable headline-generating script, but this seems like a good move. One of the developers has posted an interesting overview of the redesign process.

It’s a nice feather in the cap of the Drupal community to have a prominent and busy site adopt their software. My only dig at them is that I figured it out because I saw “/node/” in the URLs!

Massachusetts, where I live, has been quietly leading the way toward freeing state government from proprietary software and document formats. In 2004 there was talk that proprietary software would be out completely, but that didn’t pan out. Instead, they’ve moved forward with plans to require government offices to use only open document formats. Friday’s article in the Boston Globe notes:

The policy change wouldn’t affect only Microsoft. The state uses other programs, such as IBM’s Lotus Notes and the word processing program WordPerfect, that employ proprietary file formats. These products would also have to be replaced, or upgraded to versions that work with the OpenDocument standard.

I stumbled across the Adobe Blogs recently. It looks like the site has been up less than a month, but there is some interesting reading there. I particularly like the posts from Bill McCoy, who describes himself only as being “responsible for platform product management at Adobe, including our desktop and mobile Reader software and associated PDF technologies.” I have no idea what “platform product management” means, but as long as he keeps up the good writing and candor (phrases like “XML configuration spaghetti” and “eBooks are a bit of a sore subject at Adobe right now” come to mind), he’s all right with me.

Recordings from this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention have started showing up over on the excellent ITConversations. First up is Nat Torkington and Tim O’Reilly speaking about O’Reilly Radar.

I’m looking forward to seeing more sessions appear in the coming weeks – especially the ones I didn’t get to!