Not My Idea of FON

FON is such an obviously clever and right-on idea that I have struggled to articulate exactly why it is I have been reluctant to write about it. After all, the basic plan is brilliant:

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

We call members of the FON Community Foneros. It’s simple to become a Fonero. You just need to buy La Fonera, which enables you to securely and fairly share your home broadband connection with other Foneros.

Then when you’re away from home and you need Internet access, just log on to a FON Access Point, and you can use the Internet for free. You don’t need to take your router with you – you just need to remember your Fonero login and password.

But it then rises close to genius by making the following distinction:

# Most of us are Linuses. That means that we share our WiFi at home and in return get free WiFi wherever we find a FON Access Point.

# Aliens are people who don’t share their WiFi yet. We charge them just €/$ 3 for a Day Pass to access the FON Community.

# Bills are in business and so want to make some money from their WiFi. Instead of free roaming, they get a 50% share of the money that Aliens pay to access the Community through their FON Access Point.

And now, you can get La Fonera - a WiFi access point that joins you to the FON network - for just a few Euros.

So what's my problem? Maybe it's this:

Interestingly this video was shot with a Nokia N80 (disclosure I am on Nokia's Internet Board) and sent over wifi to a Fonera (disclosure I am the CEO of Fon) which automatically posted the clip in VPOD (disclosure I am an investor in Vpod.tv) which is then linked to my blog which is in Moveable Type (disclosure, two good friends of mine Loic Le Meur and Joichi Ito who are partners in Six Apart well known bloggers and members of the Japan and French Fon boards).

Disclosure: this makes me sick. (Via GigaOM.)

Gates Supports Open...

...Access. Amazing, the Gates Foundation is giving to

Public Library of Science (PLoS), to launch a new medical journal on neglected diseases -- US$1.1 million: PLoS will launch PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a new open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal covering science, policy, and advocacy on neglected tropical diseases.

Yup, that's "open access", as in practically the same as open source, but applied to academic papers.

Hm, Gates is piquantly close to getting it.... (Via Open Access News.)

Microsoft's Unhealthy Move

For all its corporate rapaciousness, Microsoft has always been scrupulous in keeping its partners happy: it knows that much of its immense strength derives from the huge Windows ecosystem it has created around itself. Indeed, whatever its manifest misdeeds in terms of abusing its monopoly position, it is arguable - and the company itself has made the argument - that through this vast network it has created far more wealth than any harm it is accused of.

Against this background, two recent moves are pretty astonishing. First, there is Zune, which as many commentators have observed, is unlikely to damage Apple so much as all those who signed up to the horribly-named "PlaysForSure" initiative to provide online music services based around Microsoft technologies.

And now, even more surprising, we have Microsoft's move into offering healthcare software. The actual figures involved are minuscule, but the signal it sends is immense. For it seems to suggest that in its growing desperation at the loss of market share in its traditional sectors - and with the threat of ever-greater losses in the future - the company has decided to break its golden rule to leave to third-parties vertical markets, while it supplies (at a handsome profit) all the infrastructural stuff.

I can't help seeing the hand of Ballmer in this, eager to make his own mark on what is still Bill Gates's company. It would be an obvious thing for a hard-nosed salesman to do - to carve up former partners in an attempt to grab slices of new pies. But I predict that the move will go down very badly with Microsoft's erstwhile supporters, already unnerved by the sword of Zune hanging over them, as they begin to wonder which sector will be next on the Microsoft hitlist.

In fact, I expect they're starting to feel as sick as a parrot.

Bill Gates Wants to Share "Openly"

It looks like Bill Gates is one step closer to getting it. According to this press release from his foundation, regarding a major research grant to create a series of research consortia to accelerate HIV vaccine development:

These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development.

...

As a condition for receiving funding, the newly-funded vaccine discovery consortia have agreed to use the central facilities to test vaccine candidates, share information with other investigators, and compare results using standardized benchmarks.

In other words, Gates is demanding open data sharing, and maybe open access too (it's not clear yet, as Peter Suber notes).

But this is a slippery slope, Bill: once you accept the inherent efficiency of sharing data "openly", as the press release emphasises, it's only a short conceptual leap before you find yourself accepting and then encouraging the other ways of sharing stuff "openly"....

I've Seen the Future - and It's Patented

The name Nathan Myhrvold probably doesn't strike fear into your heart; it may not even be known to you. But one day, rest assured, he will make Bill Gates look benign. Gates simply wants to own the software industry, and, as has been amply shown over the last quarter century, is prepared to do anything - including creating the odd illegal monopoly - to achieve that. But at least Gates has the virtue of believing passionately in the value of the software his people make; and at least they do actually make something.

Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures, does not make anything. It will never make anything. For its domain is patents, and all it aspires to do is to create the world's biggest and most lucrative heap of patents to get the people who do actually make stuff to pay licences - whether justified or not - by threatening to sue them if they don't. Industrial-scale patent troll-dom, in other words.

Myhrvold once worked for Microsoft, and became very rich doing so. His new venture is based on an astute reading of the broken patent system in the US, and on how to play it in all its glorious brokenness. If you want the full details, read the excellent article in IP Law & Business, probably the best introduction to just how Myhrvold intends to do it.

He may well pull it off. His logic is impeccable, as you would expect from someone who is anything but a fool. But it is based on the past - a deeply-flawed past that threatens to bring innovation to a grinding halt in the US, and anywhere else stupid enough to acquiesce in the latter's demands that its own patent regime be imposed as part of trade agreements.

For all his cleverness, Myhrvold cannot see - will not see - that the future belongs to a different model for "intellectual property", a commons-based approach made famous by free software, though not invented by it (it's actually as old as the idea of the commons, which goes back to the Romans and beyond into the mists of time).

In fact, Myhrvold's likely success in bringing entire sectors to their corporate knees through the use of broad patent portfolios may have the ironic consequence of hastening the ultimate repeal of all the accumulated stupidities in the fields of patents, trademarks and copyright. For this reason, I wish him every success. Almost.

Linus Torvalds' First Usenet Posting

It was 15 years ago today that Linus made his first Usenet posting, to the comp.os.minix newsgroup. This is how it began:

Hello everybody,
I've had minix for a week now, and have upgraded to 386-minix (nice), and duly downloaded gcc for minix. Yes, it works - but ... optimizing isn't working, giving an error message of "floating point stack exceeded" or something. Is this normal?

Minix was the Unix-like operating system devised by Andy Tanenbaum as a teaching aid, and gcc a key hacker program that formed part of Stallman's GNU project. Linus' question was pretty standard beginner's stuff, and yet barely two days later, he answered a fellow-newbie's question as if he were some Minix wizard:

RTFSC (Read the F**ing Source Code :-) - It is heavily commented and the solution should be obvious (take that with a grain of salt, it certainly stumped me for a while :-).

He may have been slightly premature in according himself this elevated status, but it wasn't long before he not only achieved it but went far beyond. For on Sunday, 25 August, 1991, he made another posting to the comp.os.minix newsgroup:

Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.

The hobby, of course, was Linux, and this was its official announcement to the world.

But imagine, now, that Linus had never made that first posting back in March 1991. It could have happened: as Linus told me in 1996 when I interviewed him for a feature in Wired, back in those days

I was really so shy I didn't want to speak in classes. Even just as a student I didn't want to raise my hand and say anything.

It's easy to imagine him deciding not to “raise his hand” in the comp.os.minix newsgroup for fear of looking stupid in front of all the Minix experts (including the ultimate professor of computing, Tanenbaum himself). And if he'd not plucked up courage to make that first posting, he probably wouldn't have made the others or learned how to hack a simple piece of code he had written for the PC into something that grew into the Linux kernel.

What would the world look like today, had Linux never been written? Would we be using the GNU Hurd – the kernel that Stallman intended to use originally for his GNU operating system, but which was delayed so much that people used Linux instead? Or would one of the BSD derivatives have taken off instead?

Or perhaps there would simply be no serious free alternative to Microsoft Windows, no open source movement, and we would be living in a world where computing was even more under the thumb of Bill Gates. In this alternative reality, there would be no Google either, since it depends on the availability of very low-cost GNU/Linux boxes for the huge server farms that power all its services.

It's amazing how a single post can change the world.

Picture This

I wrote about Riya.com a month ago; now it's out in beta, so you can try out its face recognition technology. I did, and was intrigued to find that this photo was tagged as "Bill Gates". Maybe Riya uses more artificial intelligence than they're letting on.

It's certainly a clever idea - after all, the one thing people (misanthropes apart) are interested in, is people. But you do have to wonder about the underlying technology when it uses addresses like this:

http://www.riya.com/highRes?search=1fSPySWh
FrHn7AnWgnSyHaqJl6bzuGByoFKJuG1H%2Fv
otjYbqlIMI22Qj88Vlcvz2uSnkixrhzHJP%0Aej%
2B9VuGvjiodlKDrBNS8pgy%2FaVqvckjfyo%2
BjhlL1sjK5CgHriGhifn3s2C1q%2B%2FnL1Emr
0OUPvn%2FM%0AJ0Ire5Zl2QUQQLUMi2Naq
Ny1zboiX7JtL77OG96NmV5VT8Buz4bzlyPFmi
ppcvmBJagMcftZjHUG%0AFlnXYIfp1VOGWx
gYijpgpDcsU9M4&pageNumber=9&e=bIaIR30d
SGNoZcG8jWL8z2LhcH%2FEg1LzsBF%2F6pr
Fd2Jm7tpMKFCXTu%2FBsOKk%2FVdS

I know a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but not in the URL, surely....

A Little Note About Microformats

Further proof that things are starting to bubble: small but interesting ideas like microformats pop up out of nowhere (well, for me, at least). As the About page of the eponymous Web site says:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

The key thing is that they are built around XHTML, which is effectively HTML done properly. Examples of microformats that are based on things that may be familiar include hCard, based on the very old vCard, hCalendar, based on the equally venerable iCalendar, moderately old stuff like XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which you stumble across occasionally on the Web, and the inscrutable XOXO (which I've heard of, but never seen brandished in anger).

That's the upside; on the downside, Bill Gates has started talking about it.

Microsoft Goes (a Bit More) Open Source

Many people were amazed back in 2004 when Microsoft released its first open source software, Windows Installer XML (WiX). But this was only the first step in a long journey towardness openness that Microsoft is making - and must make - for some time to come.

It must make it because the the traditional way of writing software simply doesn't work for the ever-more complex, ever-more delayed projects that Microsoft is engaged upon: Brooks' Law, which states that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later," will see to this if nothing else does.

Microsoft itself has finally recognised this. According to another fine story from Mary Jo Foley, who frequently seems to know more about what's happening in the company than Bill Gates does:

Beta testing has been the cornerstone of the software development process for Microsoft and most other commercial software makers for as long as they've been writing software. But if certain powers-that-be in Redmond have their way, betas may soon be a thing of the past for Microsoft, its partners and its customers.

The alternative is to adopt a more fluid approach that is a commonplace in the open source world:

Open source turned the traditional software development paradigm on its head. In the open source world, testers receive frequent builds of products under development. Their recommendations and suggestions typically find their way more quickly into developing products. And the developer community is considered as important to writing quality code as are the "experts" shepherding the process.

One approach to mitigating the effects of Brooks' Law is to change the fashion in which the program is tested. Instead of doing this in a formal way with a few official betas - which tend to slow down the development process - the open source method allows users to make comments earlier and more frequently on multiple builds as they are created, and without hindering the day-to-day working of developers, who are no longer held hostage by artificial beta deadlines that become ends in themselves rather than means.

Microsoft is Right - No, Really

At first sight, the $100 laptop has everything going for it: it is based around open source software, uses renewable energy (you wind it up), and is trying to do something really worthwhile - put computing into the hands of children in developing nations.

But I have to say that, even though it is being done for all the usual wrong reasons, Bill Gates's alternative solution - to use a mobile 'phone to provide the processing power - seems spot on to me. As prices continue to plummet, mobile 'phones will soon be affordable even in countries with very low per capita incomes.

Moreover, today's mobiles are already computers: they play music, take digital photos, and often run office-type software (to say nothing of games). And they just keep on getting smaller and lighter. Convergence from the other end - putting a 'phone into a portable computer - does not lead to the same end-result for one simple reason: there is a limit to how small you can make a keyboard.

Mobiles get round this problem by ignoring it: keyboard entry is done either in a minimalist form (texting) or not at all. As I've written elsewhere, once voice recognition systems are good enough to cope with breathless speech on the move with significant background noises, nobody would even think of using a keyboard; typing will become some ancient art like thatching or dry stone walling.

Better, then, to work out ways of turning what will soon be the ubiquitous mobile into a teaching tool. Better still, if that tool were based on some form of GNU/Linux for mobiles rather than Microsoft's proprietary solutions. But I fear this is unlikely to happen: the MIT project has achieved a technical, economic and political momentum that means it will carry on regardless of whether it is actually the best solution.

Time for Mac users to see the OSS light?

The good news just kept on coming in Steve Jobs's recent MacWorld speech: $5.7 million revenue in the last quarter for Apple; 14 million iPods sold during the same period; a run-rate of a billion songs a year sold on iTunes. And of course some hot new hardware, the iMac and MacBook Pro. What more could Mac fans ask for?

How about an office suite whose long-term future they can depend on?

Microsoft may have announced “a formal five-year agreement that reinforces Microsoft’s plans to develop Microsoft Office for Mac software for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs,” but Mac users would do well to consider the company's record here, as its has progressively shut down its line of Macintosh software. First, it dropped its MSN client, then Internet Explorer and more recently Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has good reason to hate Apple. Steve Jobs and his company represent everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are not: hip and heroic, perfectionist yet popular. Apple has always been Microsoft's main rival on the desktop, but the appearance of Intel-based Macintoshes will make the company more dangerous than it has ever been. Probably the only reason that Microsoft has kept alive its Macintosh division is that it looks good from an anti-trust viewpoint: “See? We're not abusing our position – we even support rivals...”. The Macintosh version of Office may bring in money, but it's a trivial amount compared to the Windows version, and hardly worth the effort expended on it.

This means that the future of Microsoft Office for the Mac can never be certain. The agreement with Apple might be extended, but knowing Microsoft, it might not. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to ensure that the Windows versions of Office has advantages over the one running on the new Intel Macs – otherwise the incentive to buy PCs running Windows will be reduced even more.

So what should concerned Mac users do? The obvious solution is to move to an open source alternative. An important benefit of taking this route – one often overlooked when comparisons are made with proprietary offerings – is that free software is effectively immortal. Sometimes it goes into hibernation, but when the code is freely available, it never dies.

Just look at the case of the Mozilla Application Suite. The Mozilla Foundation decided not to continue with the development of this code base, but to concentrate instead on the increasingly successful standalone programs Firefox and Thunderbird. Had Mozilla been a commercial outfit, that would have been the end of the story for the program and its community. Instead, some hackers were able to take the old Mozilla Application Suite code and use it as the basis of a new project called SeaMonkey.

A similar desire to get things moving outside existing structures motivated the creation of the separate NeoOffice project, the port of the free OpenOffice.org office suite to run natively on MacOS X (there is also a version that uses the X11 windowing system). As the FAQ explains: “The primary reason that we stay separate is that we can develop, release, and support a native Mac OS X office suite with much less time and money than we could if we worked within the OpenOffice.org project.” This is hardly an option for the Mac Office team at Microsoft; so when Gates and Ballmer give Mac Office the chop, there will be no Redmond resurrections.

It is true that NeoOffice is not yet quite as polished as the versions on other platforms. And maybe Microsoft Office is superior – at the moment. But there is nothing that some hacking won't fix, and with serious support from the Macintosh community (and perhaps even financial help from Apple) any outstanding issues would soon be resolved. The emergence of OpenDocument as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office formats only strengthens the case for switching to free software.

The wild excitement generated by Steve Jobs's MacWorld announcements is understandable, but also dangerous. Mac users may be so focussed on the hot new hardware as to forget something crucial: that, ultimately, it is the application software that counts. Macintosh enthusiasts should refuse the poisoned chalice that Microsoft is offering them with its generous offer to keep Office for the Mac on life support for a few more years, and instead should channel some of their famous passion into supporting the creation of a first-class, full-featured open source office suite.

Yahoo! Gets Del.icio.us

The only suprising thing about Yahoo's acquisition of del.icio.us is that Yahoo got there before Google.

The three-way battle between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for dominance hinges on who can colonise the Web 2.0 space first. Google seemed to be ahead, with its steady roll-out of services like Gmail (albeit in beta) and purchase of Blogger and Picasa. But Yahoo is coming on strongly: now that it has both Flickr and del.icio.us it has started to catch up fast.

The dark horse, as ever is Microsoft: its recent announcement of Windows and Office Live show that it does not intend to be left behind. But unlike its previous spurts to overtake early leaders like Netscape, this one requires something more profound than mere technical savvy or marketing might.

Web 2.0 has at its heart sharing and openness (think blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us etc.). For Microsoft to succeed, it needs to embrace a philosophy which is essentially antithetical to everything it has done in its history. Bill Gates is a brilliant manager, and he has many thousands of very clever people working for him, but this may not be enough. Even as it tries to demonstrate "openness" - through SharedSource, or "opening" its Office XML formats - the limits of Microsoft's ability fully to embrace openness become clearer. But that is the point about being real open: it is all or nothing.

The question is not so much whether Microsoft will ever get it - everything in its corporate DNA says it won't - but whether Google and Yahoo will. In this sense, Web 2.0 is theirs to lose, rather than for Microsoft to win.