BL = Betrayed Library

This kind of naive adulation is beginning to stick in my craw:

The British Library is bringing some of the world's rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.

To that end, it is using a unique piece of software called Turning the Pages, designed to allow readers to look at rare books in a natural way. With Turning the Pages, users can read the books in their original format, almost exactly as they were intended to be read by their original audience.

Why? Well:

A new version, Turning the Pages 2.0™, runs on Microsoft Vista operating system (and on Windows XP with the .NET 3 framework). It will also run on other operating systems using the Microsoft Silverlight plugin.

So the BL's idea of progress is locking down books - you know, those old-fashioned things without DRM - with patent-encumbered technology. That's "giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing"? Only in the minds of rather dim librarians who understand nothing about the broader implications of the shiny technology they choose. Me, I call it a betrayal of everything the once-great BL stood for....

How Will Microsoft Cope with Clouds?

One of the central questions for future computing is: How will Microsoft cope with clouds? In other words, when the PC platform becomes almost an adjunct, how will the company maintain its vice-like grip on the market? A typically thorough post here from Mary Jo Foley about Microsoft's Live Mesh provides some important clues. Here's one part that I found particularly interesting:

Even though the Live Mesh team went out of its way to emphasize that Microsoft sees Live Mesh as an open platform, and not just one designed to appeal to the Windows/.Net choir, both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (Silverlight) are key elements of the Live Mesh developer stack (a diagram of which — here on the left — can be enlarged to full size by clicking on it). Support for Flash, Cocoa, JavaScript and other non-Microsoft-centric technologies is there, too. But given Live Mesh is from Microsoft, I’d wager Silverlight applications and services will look and work better as Live Mesh endpoints than apps/services built on and for Mac OSX/Safari, Linux and Mozilla ones.

This is standard lock-in: provide a nominally "open" platform, but make sure it works better with Microsoft products - a variant on the old "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run." Some things never change....

Unlocking the Value of Open Innovation

It's a truism that there are more clever people out there than in here, wherever "here" may be. So it makes sense to try to tap into that cleverness - which is precisely what open source and cognate movements attempt to do. Now it looks like business is slowly getting the hang of this:

Barrick’s Unlock the Value program is a unique opportunity for scientific problem solvers. We invite proposals for an economically viable way to recover silver from silica-encapsulated ore. For proposals judged to have merit, Barrick will:

* Fund your research
* Pay you a consulting fee
* Provide resources and expertise
* Help you develop and test your idea

For a method or technology that is successfully implemented, Barrick will pay a performance bonus of $10,000,000.

(Via Peter Murray-Rust.)

Is Silverlight for GNU/Linux Moonshine?

Hm, don't know what to think about this:

Over the last few months we've been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux. Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

I suppose it depends on how open the specification is - and whether it's just OOXML by any other name....

Anyone any thoughts?

Adobe Flexes Its Open Source Muscles

As regular readers may have noticed, I'm not a big fan of Flash. But news that Adobe is open-sourcing Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications, is, I suppose, marginally better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick:

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

It looks like my musings have come true rather sooner than I expected.

Microsoft Sees the (Silver)Light

I suppose I ought to approve of Microsoft's new Silverlight:

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

In other words a Flash-killer. Well, maybe not, but at least it might nudge Adobe into opening up their technology. And how about this for progress:

Silverlight will support all major browsers on both Mac OS X and on Windows. Particular care is being taken to account for differences in platform and browser capabilities to ensure a consistent experience including experiences on FireFox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

OK, it's not quite GNU/Linux support, but Firefox at least seems to have made an impression.