Could Open Source Software Be Put Into The Public Domain Instead?

There are dozens of free software and open source licences -- many would argue rather too many. Different licenses impose different conditions. For example, the best-known and most widely-used is the GNU General Public License, which is designed to ensure that anyone building on GPL'd software and distributing it should make the modified program available under the same license. Others, such as the BSD license simply require the copyright and license notices to be included with any code that is used. 

On Techdirt.

Microsoft Proves it Can Go Open Source

One of the technologies I am waiting for would allow me to effect transactions without giving over vast quantities of personal data. After all, what companies really need to know are: can I pay, and do I have the necessary qualities (age, residence) I claim to have. They don't need to know a vast range of irrelevant *details* about me.

Such a system exists; it's called U-Prove:

It was put together by respected cryptography researcher Dr Stefan Brands. He created a company to develop and market U-Prove, Credentica, which was bought by Microsoft in March 2008. With U-Prove, identity information can be used securely, and private data can be safely shared to those parties that need it, without leaking more information than is required.

U-Prove allows the creation of secure ID tokens, which are pieces of data that incorporate whatever information I need for a given task—but no more—along with cryptographic protection to ensure that they can't be forged, reused, traced back to me, or linked to other tokens that I have issued.

In a world with U-Prove, many existing identity management problems would go away. If my credit card company and online music service both supported U-Prove, I could create a token that allowed a single limited electronic money transfer from my card to the music company, without disclosing my name, address, or date of birth, and without that token being usable to make further purchases. Similarly, I might want to buy a computer game from an online store, the same situation as before, but this time with a twist: the computer game is rated 18+. So to make the purchase, I have to reveal my age, as well as the money transfer, to the online store. U-Prove lets me do this, but still doesn't require me to reveal my name, address, or any other irrelevant detail.

An hour-long presentation by Dr Brands describes how U-Prove works and how it achieves what it does (with even more detail available in his freely downloadable book). It builds on existing public key cryptography concepts, but adds to them the important ability to hide data. Normal public key cryptography is something of an all-or-nothing affair—to prove that a particular piece of data was encrypted by a particular person, you need to know the data. U-Prove allows that proof to take place without revealing all the data.

This is absolutely brilliant. There's just one problem: you can't use it in practical situations, because it's not widely deployed. And because it's not widely deployed, nobody uses it...

So, how do you break that vicious circle? Easy - you make it freely available to encourage uptake - and that's just what Microsoft has done:

It is for these reasons that Microsoft has released its U-Prove SDK using the open source BSD license. Source code is available in both C# and Java, and the technology is covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. This is a irrevocable promise by Microsoft that the company will not assert any claims against anyone using the technology that relate to any patents covering the technology. By releasing the technology under a permissive license, and by making a legally binding agreement that patents covering the technology will not be used in legal action, the company hopes that there will be no barriers to using the system for both service and identity providers.

It's really great to see Microsoft taking advantage of open source in a *good* way; it's just unfortunate that the accompanying Open Specification Promise has a big loophole that makes it pretty useless for consideration by serious free software projects.

Now, if Microsoft were to place all the relevant patents in the public domain....

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Opening up: New York Senate's Doing It *Now*

Vancouver may have promised that it will do it, the New York Senate is actually opening up completely now:

Welcome to the Open NYSenate

To pursue its commitment to transparency and openness the New York State Senate is undertaking a cutting-edge program to not only release data, but help empower citizens and give back to the community. Under this program the New York Senate will, for the first time ever, give developers and other users direct access to its data through APIs and release its original software to the public. By placing the data and technological developments generated by the Senate in the public domain, the New York Senate hopes to invigorate, empower and engage citizens in policy creation and dialogue.

...

Original Software

As a user of Open-Source software the New York Senate wants to help give back to the community that has given it so much - including this website. To meet its needs the Senate is constantly devleoping new code and fixing existing bugs. Not only does the Senate recognize that it has a responsibility to give back to the Open Source community, but public developments, made with public money should be public.

...

Data Sets

The New York Senate's Open Data page is the official repository of all government data. There you can browse through data produced by and considered by the Senate in their original forms as well as various other file types created for your convenience; including but not limited to: Excel spreadsheets, .csv, text files and PDFs. To supplement the source data it is making available, the Senate has also created the Plain Language Initiative designed to help explain complex data sets and legal terms in plain language.

...

Open-Source Software & Software Licenses

In order to make the Senate's information and software as public as possible, it is has adopted unique system using two types of licenses - GNU General Public License as well as the BSD License. This system is meant to ensure the most public license is used in each specific case such that:

(i) Any Software released containing components with preexisting GPL copyrights must be released pursuant to a GPL v3 copyright restriction.

(ii) Any Software created independently by the Senate without any preexisting licensing restrictions on any of its components shall be released under dual licensing and take one of two forms: (a) a BSD license, or (b) a GPL v3 license. The ultimate user of such Software shall choose which form of licensing makes the most sense for his or her project.

This is getting too easy: I want more of a challenge to opening up government.

Anyway, kudos to all involved - great move.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Ubuntu is So Last Year: Here's Kongoni

Well, a groovy African name worked for Ubuntu, so maybe it will for Kongoni:

Named after the Shona word for the GNU, Kongoni has a strong BSD-Unix influence and includes a ports-like package management system. The underlying code is, however, based on Slackware and the makers are promising to keep the distribution free of proprietary software.

Interestingly:

Technically, says Venter, Kongoni adopts a BSD ports-like approach to package management. “Ports represent a powerful way to distribute software as a set of tools that automatically fetch the sources of the program and then compile it locally,” he says. “This is more bandwidth friendly for users as source code is usually smaller than prebuilt packages. This benefit is particularly useful in Africa where bandwidth is expensive, and since Kongoni came from Africa this was a major concern.”

...

The core system includes a KDE 4.2 desktop as the default desktop manager but the system intended to be easy to remaster, says Venter. Users can easily build and replicate the system with their own preferred setups and desktops.

O'Reilly's Got Bookworm(s)

To my shame, I'd not come across Bookworm before:

Bookworm allows readers to add ePub books to their online library and read them on their web browser or mobile device. If you have a portable device that supports ePub (such as the Sony Reader or iRex iLiad), you can download your books to put on your e-reader. Bookworm is specially optimized for use in the iPhone and can export directly to Stanza.

More to the point, it's open source, available under the BSD licence (and thus suitable for all commercial use, too).

Bookworm is now under the aegis of O'Reilly books, which seems appropriate. It's a good time for the project to receive more resources and a higher profile: ebooks are beginngin to take off, and it's important that there be a free reader that can benefit from that, and that we in the free software world can support.

In Praise of the Public Domain

I write a lot about licensing here. Indeed, licensing arguably lies at the heart of free software. But there's another important way of looking at things, which is essentially licence-less, as John Wilbanks reminds us:

It is a damn shame that we no longer think of the public domain as an option that is attractive. It’s a sign of the victory of the content holders that the free licensing movements work against that something without a license – something that is truly free, not just just free “as in” – is somehow thought to be worse. We’ve bought into their games if we allow the public domain to be defined as the BSD. The idea of the public domain has been subjected to continuous erosion thanks to both the big content companies and our own movements, to the point where we think freedom only comes in a contract.

The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of “freedom” we’re playing a dangerous game.

How true. Which means that those of us in the free software world must be careful that we don't play into the hands of those who want *everything* to be licensed.

Good Code, Ugly Code, Open Code

And talking of 0.01 code and self-deprecation:

I have released AjaxLife’s (very ugly and hackish) code under the revised BSD license. :D

You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/ajaxlife/. As it says, the code is messy. But eh.

That’s what you get when you throw something together over the weekend in a language you don’t know. And for added fun, part of the code was lost at some point (file corruption) and had to be recovered by decompiling. So, as I said. Ugly code. :p

Well done Linus, er, Katharine.

Microsoft ODF Plugin Story Gets...Richer

When I wrote about Microsoft's announcement that it would be sponsoring a project to create an ODF plugin for its Office product, I said the story was big. But I was wrong: it's actually really big, because of a deeply ironic twist to the story, detailed on Groklaw:

It seems that when Microsoft was looking to build its new ODF plugin, it took a short cut. It seems to have grabbed some code from the OpenDocument Fellowship's program that converts ODF to HTML, written by J. David Eisenberg. His code is released under a dual license, the LGPL and the Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft has put it into its ODF plugin, which is licensed under the BSD license.

Is that allowed? It's nice Microsoft endorses the value of the ODF Fellowship code, since they are forever telling us their own code is better. But we're trying to parse out which license Microsoft thinks it is complying with. Not the LGPL, I trust. My question, and I'm no Apache guru, is what about Apache sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and maybe 4.4, plus the required form of notice in the Appendix? It's certainly possible I'm missing something. But it seems it may be Microsoft that neglected to notice some requirements.

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.