I write mainly about Technology, Politics, and Technology Politics. These key categories were developed over time at work from 2004 and more recently, since the 2010 General Election influenced by and reflecting my political activism in the Deptford Labour Party. and latterly my membership of Another Europe and its National Committee.

My views on the economics of software and collaborative development were formed while working at Sun Microsystems. Sun had returned to open source and my views were reinforced when in the later years  I spent timein the public policy team,  which let me participate in the management of the EU Commission’s R&D budget; they insist that public money buys public access. In the UK, from the publication of the Digital Britain White Paper in 2009 through to the summer of 2010, I campaigned against the Digital Economy Act neé Bill and joined the Open Rights Group. This has also had a long term influence on the blog.

Much of the writing on technology is related to its economics and in these articles I consider developer productivity and intellectual property laws in the UK and EU. The politics articles vary from comments on the law, through to local campaigns I participate in, the politics of the London Assembly, the Labour Party and national politics. I still blog on the technology itself, but much of my thoughts on technology are recorded in my companion wiki.

To help read it, and find stuff, the blog has a rich category and tag taxonomy. The categories are PoliticsTechnologyadmintravelculture and silly. You can browse the tag cloud on the tag cloud page.

History

This is version five.

The first blog I started since we were encouraged to do so at work while at Sun Microsystems. On leaving, I always meant to move to wordpress, but the need to say some things, particularly about the Digital Economy Act and the EU’s anti-competition review of the Oracle take-over of Sun Microsystems during the Autumn of 2009, led to me moving to Snipsnap on my Cobalt Qube. For various hardware related reasons, this site failed, and I started a 3rd blog here, using 1+1’s canned blog solution. It was not possible to comment on that, unless I issued a login, so you can imagine how that worked; I have now created a fully hosted wordpress blog on this site and installed the “social login” plugin with which I hope you can comment. I originally used the zbench theme, and now use spacious.

This blog now has the complete contents of the previous four versions uploaded. During the summer of 2013, I restored the snipsnap blog (version 2) and copied across most of that content. Some of that content was also copied across to my companion wiki.

In July 2016, I completed the copying of most of my sun/oracle blog (version 1) to this site, just in time it would seem. Again some of the now outdated content was left behind, and some copied to the companion wiki. I experimented with ello.co in 2014, decided that I had to have RSS and copied it to a separate wordpress blog.As far as I can tell, I moved to the Spacious theme in 2016, and this is the date from which I count version 5.

In December 2017, Storify announced it was closing its service; I have now saved, mirrored and repubkished these articles.

In May 2018, I merged blogs.davelevy.info and ello.davelevy.info here, and exposed the unified blog at https://davelevy.info/blog. This URL replaced blog.davelevy.info, although the old URL’s still work.

In 2021, I opened a Medium account and post much of the blog to my medium blog too.