OStatic

I blame the souls at Ars Technica just as much as the diabolical (though creative) minds at Miro for the ear-drum shattering, make-your-teeth-ache squeal I just unleashed upon the world. Miro's new fundraising campaign -- where for $4 a month, one can adopt a line of code -- has got to be one of the most innovative, creative, and inviting fundraising efforts an open source software project could ever dream up.

While I still take stock in the notion that perhaps open source projects could benefit from spinning their requests for monetary contributions as investments rather than donations, the Miro team has hit on (figuratively, anyway) real gold with this effort. Adopting a line of code (as if it were a whale, or, even, say, a penguin) and giving a little to the adoptee in return -- a blog widget, an adoption certificate, and a picture of your fostered line -- has a low impact on the project's resources, can garner some great returns, and is just fun.

I'm betting it'll turn out to be effective in other ways, as well.

Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has been running a series of posts on how providers of Internet browsers should approach standards on the web, and how they should approach competition with other browsers. In her latest installment, she notes that one point she has made in the series of posts has received more criticism than any other from readers: IE must comply with web standards. The ongoing drag on the web?s functionality caused by IE?s limitations remains an enormous problem, she writes. Is Microsoft holding the web back?