SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

I've been going through Kindles with every new release of the hardware. So far it was a limited experience for the lack of wireless outside the US and for the lack of anything WiFi. So I had to download the books via USB. 

Guess how happy I was when Amazon announced their "International Kindle" that could also do GSM for the "Whispernet" service, what Amazon calls it. Today the Kindle arrived and it actually worked, "Whispernet" is active in Germany, different from my other Kindles where it only works when in the US. Read more ...

This morning I spent some time updating myself on the major Cloud offerings - Microsoft Azure and their hosted offerings, Amazons EC2/S3, Google AppEngine. IBM BlueCloud and VMWares vCloud (a quick comparison can be found here).

This stuff really gets me worried because none of it is open or free (as in freedom). Even though at least Amazons and Googles offerings are based on Open Source software, they themselves are anything but open.

Why worry?  Read more ...