It's an old joke by now that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop – just like last year, and the year before that. But now there's a new twist: that this year will be the year of the GNU/Linux smartphone – with the difference that it's really happening.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Here is another of Kevin Kelly's brilliant posts, but this time it's not about deep philosophical issues, but something really mundane: "How to Thrive Among Pirates". It is probably the best post I have read on the subject, since it manages to marry fresh anecdotes, a wonderful eye for detail and convincing analysis. Here's the summary (but do read it all):1) Price your copies near the cost of pirated copies. Maybe 99 cents, like iTunes. Even decent pirated copies are not free; there is some cost to maintain integrity, authenticity, or accessibility to the work.
2) Milk the uncopyable experience of a theater for all that it is worth, using the ubiquitous cheap copies as advertising. In the west, where air-conditioning is not enough to bring people to the theater, Hollywood will turn to convincing 3D projection, state-of-the-art sound, and other immersive sensations as the reward for paying. Theaters become hi-tech showcases always trying to stay one step ahead of ambitious homeowners in offering ultimate viewing experiences, and in turn manufacturing films to be primarily viewed this way.
3) Films, even fine-art films, will migrate to channels were these films are viewed with advertisements and commercials. Like the infinite channels promised for cable TV, the internet is already delivering ad-supported free copies of films.
Which is, of course, pretty much what I and people like Mike Masnick have been saying for a while.
It concludes with another rather good summing-up of what's happening here, and where we are going:Producing movies in a copyright free environment is theoretically impossible. The economics don’t make sense. But in the digital era, there are many things that are impossible in theory but possible in practice – such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and PatientsLikeMe. Add to this list: filmmaking to an audience of pirates. Contrary to expectations and lamentations, widespread piracy does not kill commercial filmmaking. Existence proof: the largest movie industries on the planet. What they are doing today, we’ll be doing tomorrow. Those far-away lands that ignore copy-right laws are rehearsing our future.
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One of the major battles under way in Europe is over open standards. As its name suggests, an open standard is one that is open to all, without restrictions or obstacles; anything less than that is just window-dressing.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Here's an interesting - and frightening - story that opened my eyes to something:Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.
"We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance," said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.
"Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.
"There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world."
What this emphasises is that antibiotics form a kind of global commons - a resource whose benefits we all share. But if one party overexploits that commons - in this case, by recklessly handing out antibiotics as the article suggests - then the commons is ruined for *all* of us.
This development is yet another reason to get commons-based thinking into wider circulation - especially amongst the people making decisions, so that they can appreciate the massive global consequences that can flow from their apparently minor local actions.
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This sounds great news for free software (and the world):China recently circulated a draft regulation regarding the use of patents in Chinese national standards. The regulation demands that for patents to be eligible for incorporation in standards, they must be made irrevocably available royalty free or for a nominal fee. This will have dramatic consequences for foreign and domestic innovators.
The royalty-free option is exactly what free software needs, and what patent holders have been fighting against so hard in the West (nominal fee is still problematic, though).
The interesting thing is that as China becomes the world's biggest market, what happens there will inevitably affect elsewhere. So this is by no means a parochial issue. (Via @zoobab.)
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As part of my continuing service to report on the fascinating developments in the Chinese chip sector, I pass on the following:It's official: China's next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as "Godson") family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server.
It won't come as a surprise to readers of this blog that China's new supercomputer will be running Linux - over 80% of the world's big machines do. What's fascinating is that this is being built out of that home-grown Loongson chip - the one that Windows doesn't run on. As the same article explains:The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning 5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company, which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a lack of support for Windows, and the ICT's failure to deliver a sufficiently powerful chip in time.
That means that as China builds more and more of these, and pushes the technology further and further, it will be Linux that benefits, not Windows, and Linux that spreads...
China + Loonson + Linux: this is one to watch...
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Here's the best description I've read of the situation:Anybody inside China who really wants to get to Google.com -- or BBC or whatever site may be blocked for the moment -- can still do so easily, by using a proxy server or buying (for under $1 per week) a VPN service. Details here. For the vast majority of Chinese users, it's not worth going to that cost or bother, since so much material is still available in Chinese from authorized sites. That has been the genius, so far, of the Chinese "Great Firewall" censorship system: it allows easy loopholes for anyone who might get really upset, but it effectively keeps most Chinese Internet users away from unauthorized material.
That seems an incredibly important fact to keep in mind over the Google/China business. Talking of which, the above comes from a typically sane post from James Fallows on the subject: well worth reading.
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The news that Google was no longer prepared to censor its search results in China has a number of interesting and important aspects.
First, it's worth noting that this extremely big news was not announced at a press conference, or even with a press release, but on a blog. That's not so surprising given that Google prides itself on being geeky, but it has one huge implication: any journalist that is not following blogs (and I'd also add Twitter) is no longer adequately equipped to stay on top of the news. The press release is officially dead (and good riddance.)
The other thing that is striking is what is not said. Google speaks of a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China
It then announces that as a result of this attack:
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn
But hang on a minute: how on earth will removing censorship diminish the likelihood of further attacks? Censorship, it would seem, has nothing to do with those attacks - unless Google is suggesting that the Chinese government was behind those attacks in some way, with this latest move from the company as a direct retaliation and warning.
And that, of course, is precisely what is going on, but there is no mention of any of this explicitly in the blog post. Nonetheless, it is extraordinary that a company should thus publicly, if only implicitly, accuse a government of being involved in attacks on its system.
As to the consequences of Google's statement, I imagine that the Chinese government will just block Google completely - China's recent actions show that it is no mood for compromise. Indeed, it is actually clamping down *harder* on the Internet, so anything like uncensored search results will be totally unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will have much effect within China. The leading search engine, Baidu, will just pick up the slack. Many people on the Internet in China regard the West's attitude to censorship and freedom of speech as hypocritical, and unwarranted meddling. It will be easy for the Chinese government to sell this as arrogant Westerners lecturing to the Chinese (again) as a way of covering up their failure to topple Baidu.
More interesting is the effect this has on the West. The latter has been increasingly subservient to China recently, with its pathetic acceptance of the crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, and its acquiescence in the propaganda of the Olympic games. This was largely based on the fact that China's economy was perceived as so important that other issues fell by the wayside (although I was under the impression that there was a name for selling oneself in this way for a bit of dosh.)
Google's action, if picked up by others, might lead to the West taking a more principled approach, whereby it is not prepared to sell its soul for a few Renminbi. Sadly, it's probably too much to expect the West to drop its hypocritical actions (censorship, surveillance) as well....
I've been writing about the Loongson chip for three years now. As I've noted several times, this chip is important because (a) it's a home-grown Chinese chip (albeit based on one from MIPS) and (b) Windows doesn't run on it, but GNU/Linux does.
It looks like Wired magazine has finally woken up to the story (better late than never):
Because the Loongson eschews the standard x86 chip architecture, it can’t run the full version of Microsoft Windows without software emulation. To encourage adoption of the processor, the Institute of Computing Technology is adapting everything from Java to OpenOffice for the Loongson chip and releasing it all under a free software license. Lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the BIOS burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up. It’s for this last reason that Richard “GNU/Linux” Stallman, granddaddy of the free software movement, uses a laptop with a Loongson chip.
Because GNU/Linux distros have already been ported to the Loongson chip, neither Java nor OpenOffice.org needs "adapting" so much as recompiling - hardly a challenging task. As for "releasing it all under a free software license", they had no choice.
But at least Wired got it right about the potential impact of the chip:Loongson could also reshape the global PC business. “Compared to Intel and IBM, we are still in the cradle,” concedes Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson. But he also notes that China’s enormous domestic demand isn’t the only potential market for his CPU. “I think many other poor countries, such as those in Africa, need low-cost solutions,” he says. Cheap Chinese processors could corner emerging markets in the developing world (and be a perk for the nation’s allies and trade partners).
And that’s just the beginning. “These chips have implications for space exploration, intelligence gathering, industrialization, encryption, and international commerce,” says Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Yup.
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News is breaking that the Chinese government will insist on censorware being shipped with all PCs:China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.
The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military.
There's more background information and discussion about the quaintly-named "Green Dam Youth Escort" here, including a link to the software itself.
This turns out - surprise, surprise, to be a Windows executable, which raises a question: what will the Chinese government do about GNU/Linux? Will they simply ignore that platform, or insist that a GNU/Linux version be developed?
And what happens if one day the use of that software becomes mandatory (it seems voluntary at the moment - but we all know how these things are the thin end of the wedge)?
How will the authorities in China - and, ultimately, elsewhere - cope with the freedom built into GNU/Linux? Will GNU/Linux one day become illegal in those parts of the world benighted enough to mandage online censorship?
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Apparently, I'm not the only one to think that open source will save the world - literally:
Could open source software save the planet? Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, says it can certainly help, by making it easier for all countries to access tools to design and build more energy-efficient buildings.
More specifically:[It] should be open source software, so companies can add to that and put whatever they want on it but then you get this body of programmes, computer aided design programmes, as a way of helping design much more efficient buildings.
Now if we develop this with China together so that this intellectual property is co-owned, co-developed, free to be used by each country, you get away from this internal discussion of ‘we’re not going to do anything until we get free IP’.
Fantastic to see someone with considerable power making the connection between intellectual monopolies and the problem of mitigating climate change - and seeing that open source is a practical way to get around the problem.
Here's something that has always struck me about Twittering in Chinese:a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the "5 Ws" (Who, What, Where, When and HoW).
So that's as if those writing in alphabetic languages had 420 characters instead of Twitter's usual 140 - a very different kettle of fish.
So, is that still a genuine tweet, given that it's no longer so constrained by its format? Is it better or worse to have more space for your thoughts? Which would you prefer: traditional micro-blogging, or Chinese-style *miniblogging*?
If you want further proof that openness is inherently subversive, try this:China's Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (BSM) has warned foreigners to turn off the GPS functions on their mobile phones, or risk arrest.
The bureau warned foreigners using GPS devices on mainland China that they could be detained if suspected of conducting illegal mapping.
The bureau has launched a crackdown on “illegal surveying”, the South China Morning Post reported, with foreigners the main targets.
Hmm, nobody seems to have told the OpenStreetMap people, who are merrily mapping China.... (Via James Fallows.)
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I came across this fascinating piece about how the Tibetan exile community not only keeps going in the face of China's unbending occupation of their homeland, but even manages to maintain some optimism. Here's a particularly heartwarming passage:
In the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and elsewhere in China, the views of exiled Tibetans and portraits of the Dalai Lama are political taboos. But in Dharamsala everything from the "other side" is available: TV news and propaganda on several different Tibetan-language Chinese channels, dramas and (again) propaganda programmes dubbed into Tibetan. Their original target audience is ethnic Tibetans living in the TAR and in neighbouring regions of the PRC where many Tibetans live (Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan - or in Tibetan, U-Tsang, Amdo and Kham).
Tibetan government-in-exile officials express confidence that Tibetans in Dharamsala won't be brainwashed by these Chinese TV channels, even that it is good for Tibetan communities to encounter Chinese arguments. Indeed, some young Tibetans in Dharamsala laughingly pointed out to me some absurdities in the propaganda TV programmes. The Tibetan officials, asked how they are going to deal with the Chinese government's heightened international PR offensive, expressed the belief that being open and honest is all they need to do.
While China clamps down on Tibetan culture, and blocks sites dealing with "forbidden" subjects like the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans in exile allow anyone to hear the Chinese side. Why? Because openness makes them stronger, and better able to counter Chinese arguments.
Moreover, the Tibetans have no fear of their people hearing the truth, unlike the fearsome and yet fearful Chinese leadership - a mighty dragon strangely afraid of the sunlight.
Usually, I attack copyright on very general grounds - it's a monopoly, it's locking up knowledge, blah-blah-blah. But here's a new one to add to the list: it can endanger freedom of expression.Given the way in which copyright law was transplanted into China without a fulsome cultural understanding of the values that informed the system, it seems the power of copyright can be easily usurped for means that infringe on political and civil rights. And yet, the United States, through the WTO process, is seeking stronger copyright protection in China.
This seeming inconsistency may not currently be a large issue because of the more explicit means of control available to the Chinese government. However, as political pressure mounts on the human rights front, it is possible that the Chinese government may have to be more covert in their attempts to suppress political speech. If that happens, copyright law may begin to look appealing to the Chinese government as a means of control.
Put it in your diaries...
The monthly release of the Netcraft survey is always good, since it generally shows the continuing dominance of Apache in the Web server field. But this month has something new and vaguely frightening:In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.
This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.
QQ is already well known for providing the most widely used instant messenger client in China, but this month's inclusion of the Qzone blogging service instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey, surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.
Got that? QQ's server QZHTTP just put on 20 million sites in the survey - enough seriously to dent both Apache and IIS (and making the latter look suddenly vulnerable to losing its second place).
Does this represent the dawn of a new (Web server) era?
What makes this all slightly troubling is that I don't know anything about QZHTTP: I presume it's not open souce, since I can't find any links to its code. But can anyone give me any more details, please? (Via @codfather.)
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IPv4 addresses are an increasingly rare resource. But I'd not spotted the parallel with oil until this:the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.
Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use, suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex. India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada, the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw double-digit percentage increases.
A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.
In other words, the greediest countries - the US and China - are rushing to burn up all the oil while there's some left, and to hell with what happens afterwards....
There's nothing like a mature, balanced view of the world:
2009, Go China!
Lead: Snowstorm, freely falling down to earth, like western values
Lead: Despair fills the sky, ice covers the earth
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Olympics were a success! We are victorious!
Lead: Hot blood and iron will of Chinese people, lighten up the dark world like burning the holy flame
All: The rivers and mountains, ever more colorful and beautiful
Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!
But wait - there's more.....
The free software organisation Asianux continues to grow in importance:Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced.
...
Over the past four years, Viet Nam has adopted policies designed to encourage the development and application of the OSS, resulting in a total of between 14,000 and 20,000 personal computers using OpenOffice, Firefox, Unikey and other free software.
...
Prior to Viet Nam joining Asianux, its membership consisted of Japan, China and South Korea.
(Via LXer.)
You would have thought this represented a real opportunity for free software:Nanchang, the capital of China's eastern Jiangxi province, has required Internet cafe operators to replace pirated server software with licensed versions. Cafes that don't will lose their license to operate, but some are grumbling about the cost of installing legitimate software.
...
"We recommend the use of Red Flag Linux server operating system or Microsoft Windows Server operating system," said the directive issued by Nanchang's Cultural Department on Oct. 22.
But even against this apparently favourably background, things are not all sweet and lightness:As part of Nanchang's crackdown on pirated software, officials apparently struck a deal with a local Red Flag Linux distributor to install licensed software and provide two years of support for 5,000 yuan (US$725).
Which seems steep. No wonder, then, that:Some Internet cafe owners were unhappy with the fee, and complained they are prevented from using other Linux distributions.
"You have to install Red Flag Linux, and pay 5,000 yuan," complained one user on the Jiangxi discussion forum (in Chinese). "If you are using a different Linux distribution, they just say it's pirated!"
Someone hasn't quite got the hang of this free software stuff, apparently.
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