No terms of endearment

Via Scobleizer comes this Uninnovate indictment of Amazon Unbox. The author’s first two points highlight obvious deficiencies of Amazon’s offerings; his last point spells out the service’s unusually restrictive (in terms of what you can’t opt out of) terms of service. Most of these terms are often developed so that companies reserve the right to do things they may never do, but agreement to them still seems onerous for the convenience of digital downloading.

Commence the “light bulb” jokes

From TWICE (registration required) comes news that 21 companies and organizations — including CEA (but not CEDIA?) — have joined to form the Home Lighting Control Alliance to promote lighting controls for new construction, renovations and retrofits. Of all the niche markets served by the professional installer channel today, I’ve long thought that lighting controls had the most potential to break out. Particularly with more reliable wireless technologies such as Z-Wave (already supported by Logitech in its highest-end Harmony remotes) and Zigbee gaining momentum, could be a natural growth opportunity for the Geek Squads and Firedogs after they have grabbed the low-hanging fruit of home theater installations.

However, there are a few key missing participants in this effort, such as Z-Wave and Lutron, which holds a commanding patent portfolio in home lighting. Furthermore, the business models of CEDIA installers leave little incentive for standardization. This space needs a major disruptive catalyst to set it in motion. Insteon products have hit the right price point; the obstacle is democratizing installation.

Mac OpenOffice debut may be preview

While the Macworld UK article seemed to indicate that OpenOffice 2.0 would “ship” for the Mac this month, a look at the OpenOffice.org Mac timeline reveals that while the Aqua version will be “presented” next month, an alpha is now scheduled for next January or February. I wouldn’t expect to see it lauded at the January Macworld event, though. Not only does Apple have its own quasi-suite in iWork, but from all accounts it hasn’t reached out very much to the OpenOffice effort. Indeed, much of the difficulty in getting OpenOffice to the Mac is explained in the FAQ of the NeoOffice project that seeks to circumvent the delays:

OpenOffice.org is paid for by Sun Microsystems so its paid staff are most concerned with completing whatever goals Sun Microsystems sets. In comparison, NeoOffice averages less than a million downloads per year and NeoOffice only runs on a platform that Sun Microsystems has rarely released software for. Because of these differences, any Mac OS X work must be coordinated with the OpenOffice.org paid staff to ensure that the Mac OS X work does not conflict with any work on the Windows, Linux, or Solaris platforms.

Sure doesn’t sound like the kind of egalitarianism that the FOSS world generally embraces.