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With Semantic Journalism: Ideas, French media blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril begins a series of posts in which he examines tools and ponders the future of semantic technologies applied to journalism. It looks to be well worth following, even if you're skeptical about the ability of machines to "understand" content.

So Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft.

Well, some sort of change is needed there. Not satisfied with crushing all competition and making it nigh-on impossible to buy a PC that doesn't already come loaded with Windows, Microsoft inserted a bit of "anti-piracy" software on millions of computers this week. Apparently they need to stop the rampant copying of Windows onto machines that already come with Windows.

Here's the thing. Their antipiracy software is broken.

When I got up this morning and tired to log onto the kitchen computer, I got a series of popups telling me my copy of Windows isn't genuine. That I'm running pirated software. That I should buy a commercial copy of Windows XP.

Now, this is an emachines T2040 that came with XP preloaded and has a big Windows sticker on the front. And it's a computer on which I already had installed and successfully run Microsoft's "genuine advantage" validator several times in order to download software such as the Windows Antispyware beta.

I couldn't get anything to run this morning. I wound up pulling the plug out of the wall, cold-booting, clicking past another barrage of accusations of piracy, and eventually getting in.

Maybe this problem is going to go away. Maybe it won't. But what strikes me is the arrogance of a big company that dislikes and distrusts its customers. It's like the music publishers viewing everybody with an MP3 player as a thief.

And it's like the arrogant attitude that, until recently, was pretty much standard in newsrooms.

I've sensed a big change in attitude in the newspaper business in tne last 24 months. The collapse of Knight-Ridder helped inject some humility where it was desperately needed. We're not the rock of Gibraltar. We're not irreplaceable. We have to earn our way every day because there are other choices.

Microsoft had better get a dose of that humility, soon. Google just released Picasa and Google Earth for Linux. What else do I use? Firefox, check. Gaim, check. Gimp, check. Thunderbird, check. OpenOffice, check. Maybe I can route around this problem.

Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation, says the era of packaged commercial software is coming to an end, because open-source alternatives are wiping out the market: "All of your software will be free. It means that, over time, you aren't going to be paying for software anymore but will instead pay for assistance with it."

I see a lesson for newspapers in the open-source software phenomenon. Everything that can be a commodity, will be a commodity. General news has passed that point. To understand where and how we create value, we must discard the notion that news has inherent commercial value -- it doesn't. Value comes into play when we focus on how and why people use information. What jobs are people trying to accomplish? How can we make that process work better? Opportunities are waiting to be discovered.

Several years ago, out of frustration with available options, I wrote my own blogging software. Writing your own solution gives you at least the promise of getting exactly what you asked for. But it's not cheap, even if you aren't paying somebody else to do it. Keeping up with a changing world is expensive.

Today I'm dumping my homegrown solution (old posts are preserved in the archive) and switching to Drupal, the open-source "community plumbing" platform we've used at work for several recent projects.

Drupal is emblematic of what's happening in the software world. It began with one developer trying to "scratch an itch," not unlike my little project to build my own tools. But it has grown into a robust system supported by hundreds of volunteer programmers, each scratching a personal itch, but collectively building toward a common goal. I can't keep up with "competition" like that, and neither can most commercial software companies.

Not all software is being commoditized that way. But the major categories are all covered -- in fact, open-source software powers most of the Internet, including Web servers, mail transport and relatively obscure (but essential) functionality such as DNS lookups. Over time proprietary solutions become eclipsed by open competitors.

This does not mean the death of software technology companies; it just means focus must shift from proprietary end-to-end solutions into profitable niches and services where genuine value can be created.

The same thing is happening to media.