Last week Metaweb announced that its open information database, Freebase, had gone into public alpha, meaning you no longer need a registered account to access Freebase. Half the reason I know about this is because I wrote some documentation (it's an O'Reilly Short Cut PDF, but you can download it for free) for Freebase developers a few weeks ago. It's really quite an interesting service -- kind of like Wikipedia, only in the form of a graph database.

For many years I've lamented two fundamental problems with software: that it doesn't have features I really want, and that it doesn't work the way it is supposed to. In other words I'm talking about a lack of appropriate features and a surfeit of bugs. As the era of open source software is slowly ushered in, and the era of proprietary software slowly wanes, I see the two different programming and licensing philosophies more dramatically exhibit these two fundamental problems, each to its own weakness. Neither of these philosophies is ever going to be enough to create truly great software. I wonder what the perfect licensing, distribution, and development model will be, assuming it has not been invented yet.

While researching the details of the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, I discovered an Adobe employee's long list of reasons why CS3 is not 64-bit. Some of them are valid, but when he regurgitated the tired old argument that compiling a program for a 64-bit environment does not make it faster, I had to wonder if he's just making up excuses for code quality problems.

The editor in chief of PC Magazine announced his departure last week, coupled with an editorial on his turnaround of opinion on Windows Vista. A longtime friend of his told me (and publicly wrote the same) that this is a significant change of opinion -- that this editor had been in love with Windows since version 3.0, and it would take a lot to break that affection. I've been trying to find the brighter side of Vista since I first started testing it, but no matter how hard I try, I keep coming to the conclusion that Windows Vista just is not worth the money to buy, or the trouble to use.

In preparing to read and review O'Reilly's The Myths of Innovation, I had the chance to interview its author, Scott Berkun. Scott worked on Internet Explorer for Microsoft back in the mid-1990s, is the author of The Art of Project Management, and currently teaches "creative thinking" at the University of Washington. In this interview, Scott Berkun answers some questions about innovation at Microsoft and in the open source software world.

The Mambo content management system (CMS) is among the most popular Web publishing tools in use today. It's easy to install, configure, and use on a basic level, but runs into various problems with complex configurations. Learning Mambo seeks to prepare readers for configuring almost every aspect of Mambo, but it falls short in important ways.

There is a vast body of computer software that can no longer be used on modern computers and operating systems. Some of these programs are still great, even by today's higher standards. As time goes on and companies forget about their old products, or are bought out by larger corporations that abandon unusable assets, we will reach a point at which the greatest desktop software ever made is no longer usable.