I asked Glyn’s help to answer many questions that came to my mind in the latest few months that shown how tough the fight to keep the Internet Free and Freedom respecting will be in the future.
For them as might be interested in such things - with bonus Italian translation.
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Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, the oldest and by far the most successful company whose business is based purely around open source, makes no bones about it: “Selling free software is hard,” he says. In fact, he goes further: “Open source is not a business model; it's a way to develop software.”
On CIO.co.uk.
One area that I have been covering increasingly is that of open government. The parallels with the other opens are not immediate, but there are some suggestive similarities. Here's a great interview that has these illuminating thoughts on the subject:
if lobbyists are the spammers of policy making, then closed doors are the DRM of good policy. Obstacles to creativity, inspiration, and just sort of generally an affront to the most creative people in that field. Being open to a social network of contributors helps solve a lot of those problems, and that gets a sigh of relief from a lot of policy makers.
BTW, the rest of the interview is well-worth reading. (Via @mlsif.)
This isn't another post about Spotify: it's a perceptive comment made by the company's CEO during an interview:Q: We’ve heard services like Spotify people say “oh no we’re not going to buy music any more”. The idea of geting people to play a monthly fee, that seems promising. Why would someone buy something?
A: I think we’re going that route. But we find that music I really love, I tend to want to buy it. Not necessarily a plastic disk, but a special edition for an artist I really like, I’m more than happy to pay $100 for a box set with a t-shirt in it, liner notes. Another person may be willing to pay for a live edition with extended tracks. Or pay for a live concert experience. The reality of the music industry today is that there isn’t one biz model. It’s about figuring out how to use downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing, all these things. I don’t think streaming music is stream.. with Spotify people label us ‘free’ music. But people pay, either with time (adverts, which are targeting), or actually paying for the service.
Of course, this is exactly what many of us have been saying for a while, and it's good that someone behind one of the more interesting new offerings seems to get this.
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Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.
Eben Moglen - Prof. of Law at Columbia and former General Counsel for the FSF. Vergrößern Better than almost anyone, Eben Moglen knows what's at stake. He was General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and helped draft several versions of the GNU GPL. As well as being Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, he is the Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. And he has an ambitious plan to save us from those seductive but freedom-threatening Web service companies. He explained to Glyn Moody what the problem is, and how we can fix it.
On The H Open.
Open source science certainly seems to be catching on lately: there have been as many articles on the subject in the last few months as in the prevous few years. Here's a good one, an interview with Walter Jessen. This is his definition of what open source science means:Open Source Science is a collaborative and transparent approach to science. To me, it means four things:
1. Open Source: the use of open and freely accessible software tools for scientific research and collaboration.
2. Open Notebook: transparency in experimental design and data management.
3. Open Data: public accessibility of scientific data, which allows for distribution, reuse and derived works.
4. Open Access: public access to scholarly literature.
It's well-worth reading, not least for its useful links to related sites.
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PHP is one of the big success stories of open source, so it's great to read this interview with its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. I was especially struck by these words of wisdom:in 1997, it basically came to the point where I was going to kill the project, because it was growing so fast and my mailbox was filling up with suggestions, complaints, patches, all these things. Up until then, I had been doing everything myself. Someone would make a suggestion, send me a patch and I'd rewrite the patch the way I thought it should be done.
I would disagree with people, I'd argue back and forth, and I just couldn't keep up any more. I was getting frustrated and sick of it all, [thinking]: "Why are all these people expecting me to fix their code? They're not paying me. What the hell am I doing working my ass off for these folks? I don't even know them – what the hell is going on here?"
So that was the time when I said: "This has to change. Give the guys who have been complaining over the last few years access to the code. The guy who has been complaining about the Oracle extension, he's been a pain in my ass for years, so it's yours now buddy. Any further issues or complaints about Oracle go directly to you." And that really empowered people.
When they felt that they now owned a slice of PHP, they started getting defensive. Instead of complaining to me about things – once they got ownership, and power, the whole atmosphere changed. And it got a lot more fun as well, because I didn't feel like it was just me against the world any more; now it was a real team effort.
That, in essence, is the secret of free software. Putting it into practice is slightly harder...
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This interview about the EU's intervention on the Oracle-Sun deal made me chortle:
Q: What is the motivation for the EC itself?
Weiss: We have a pretty common position in Gartner that there is either a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the part of the EC where it feels open source can be used as a competitive threat in the market. ... That commission is there to protect the European vendors and opportunities for European common market members. There are vendors with databases that would find Oracle an intimidating presence and may be competing with Oracle not only on the database level but also on the applications level.
Feinberg: It's a political agenda. And although it's pretty strong, for a lack of better term it is the re-emergence of protectionism by a governing body of some organization. The EU is looking for how it can protect the companies in Europe.
I see, so what they're saying is that the EU has a political agenda, and is trying to protect companies in Europe. And this would be different from what the US does, or Japan, or China, exactly *how*....?
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One of the reasons I admire RMS is because of his complete integrity and consistency. He simply will not compromise on his principles, even if it leads to the loss of support from those who are not so rigorous. I'm also impressed by the steadfastness of his vision: he does not flit from one trendy idea to another, but sticks unswervingly to his core beliefs.
But even I am astonished by this July 1986 interview with him, which could have been conducted yesterday:
BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question. My purpose is to make it possible for people to reject the chains that come with proprietary software. I know that there are people who want to do that. Now, there may be others who don't care, but they are not my concern. I feel a bit sad for them and for the people that they influence. Right now a person who perceives the unpleasantness of the terms of proprietary software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a computer. Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.
I was particularly struck by the following passage:Stallman: I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth. I think a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if he would otherwise die. And of course the people who do this are fairly rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous. I would like to see people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other people to use it. I don't want to see people get rewards for writing proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society. The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful, automatically, so to speak. But that doesn't work when it comes to owning knowledge. They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what really is useful is not encouraged. I think it is important to say that information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for themselves. That is a useful thing for people to do. This isn't true of loaves of bread. If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier. you can't make another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make the first one. It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to copy it—it's impossible.
Books were printed only on printing presses until recently. It was possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because it took so much more work than using a printing press. And it produced something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing them. And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the reading public. There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that was forbidden by copyright.
But this isn't true for computer programs. It's also not true for tape cassettes. It's partly false now for books, but it is still true that for most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work to Xerox them than to buy a copy, and the result is still less attractive. Right now we are in a period where the situation that made copyright harmless and acceptable is changing to a situation where copyright will become destructive and intolerable. So the people who are slandered as “pirates” are in fact the people who are trying to do something useful that they have been forbidden to do. The copyright laws are entirely designed to help people take complete control over the use of some information for their own good. But they aren't designed to help people who want to make sure that the information is accessible to the public and stop others from depriving the public. I think that the law should recognize a class of works that are owned by the public, which is different from public domain in the same sense that a public park is different from something found in a garbage can. It's not there for anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to use but for no one to impede. Anybody in the public who finds himself being deprived of the derivative work of something owned by the public should be able to sue about it.
A little later on, he returns to that loaf of bread:Stallman: More people using a program means that the program contributes more to society. You have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.
It's an important point, and one I think we could usefully employ to get across what is at stake here.
Imagine that you are in a world where people are starving. Imagine you have some bread, and you were confronted with starving people: most would feel a compulsion to share that bread. But imagine now that you had RMS's special kind of bread that could be eaten once or a million times: how much greater would the duty to share that bread with the hungry be? And how much more despicable would the person who refused to share that bread be?
Translate this now to the realm of ideas. We are surrounded by people hungry for knowledge, and we do possess that magic bread - digital copies of knowledge that can be shared infinitely without diminishing it. Do we not have a similar moral duty to share that magic bread of digital knowledge with all those that hunger for it?
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Two years ago, the virtual world Second Life was everywhere, as pundits and press alike rushed to proclaim it as the Next Big Digital Thing. Inevitably, the backlash began soon afterwards. The company behind it, Linden Lab, lost focus and fans; key staff left. Finally, last March, Second Life's CEO, creator and visionary, Philip Rosedale, announced that he was taking on the role of chairman of the board, and bringing in fresh leadership. But against an increasingly dismal background, who would want to step into his shoes?
From the Guardian.
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Yesterday, I wrote about the launch of the open source company Cloudera. It's always hard to tell whether startups will flourish, but among the most critical factors for survival are the skills of the management team. The fact that less than three hours after I sent out some questions about Cloudera to Mike Olson, one of the company's founders, I had the answers back would seem to augur well in this respect.
Olson explains the background to the company, and to Hadoop, the software it is based on: what it does, and why business might want to use it; he talks about his company's services and business model, and why he thinks cloud computing is neither a threat nor an opportunity for open source.
On Open Enterprise blog.
If open source did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it, if only to deal with the ragbag collection of data formats out there.
For open source has a unique flexibility and extensibility not generally available to proprietary programs, which allows it to cope with most applications and situations. This makes it ideal as a kind of software “glue” for stitching together pre-existing computer systems, which were created in an ad-hoc way with little thought of any eventual need to make them talk efficiently to each other.
This powerful feature of open source was pretty much the driving force behind the creation of the data integration company Talend. Here its cofounder and CEO, Bertrand Diard, talks eloquently about the genesis of his company, open source's unique advantages in this sphere, the state of free software in his native France, and just why Talend decided to snuggle up to Microsoft last year...
On Open Enterprise blog.
Bolivia is not a county you might associate with free software, but one of the advantages of open source is that it can be created anywhere, drawing on the support of users around the world. Aside from Linus, one person who has proved that to be the case is Brian Reale. He's the founder of Colosa, an open source company based in Bolivia's capital, La Paz.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Insightful point from Clay Shirky:the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.
As I wrote last week, foundations are playing an increasingly important role in the development of free software. I cited Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation - although Matthew Aslett rightly pointed out that Eclipse is a leader, too - but in one respect Mozilla and GNOME are somewhat different. We hear a lot about Mozilla's plans, articulated by Mitchell Baker, now ably abetted by Mark Surman, but GNOME is rather less high profile. The same goes for the head of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, so I was delighted to come across this very full interview with her....
(On Open Enterprise blog.)
Good news: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the person who essentially steered IBM toward GNU/Linux - with huge knock-on effects - has joined one of that nice Mr Obama's policy groups:
Technology, Innovation & Government Reform
The Technology, Innovation & Government Reform Policy Working Group will help prepare the incoming Administration to implement the Innovation Agenda, which includes a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country’s most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions. The Working Group is organized into four sub-teams: (1) Innovation and Government, (2) Innovation and National Priorities, (3) Innovation and Science, and (4) Innovation and Civil Society.
As well as interviewing him for Rebel Code, where he graciously spent some time explaining things when he was a busy man, I also interviewed him for the Guardian. That piece provides a lot of hints at just how wide-ranging his interests are. (Via eightbar.)
Once hackers have stopped arguing whether it's “free software” or “open source”, and discussing the relative merits of GNOME or KDE, they can always get stuck into the perennial question of whether they ought to develop applications using Mono, tied as it is to Microsoft's .NET framework, or not....
On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the hottest buzzwords/buzzphrases over the last few years has been Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is rather good news for open source, since SOA's underlying philosophy of linking together many separate elements fits free software like a glove....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Here's an interview with Cory Doctorow, who explains with frightening lucidity just how he and his chums broke the WTO system. Key bit:One of the truly subversive and amazing things the NGOs did is that we set up open WiFi networks that weren't connected to the Internet -- because there was no Internet access at the meetings when we started -- and then we would take exhaustive collaborative notes on what was said. It's very hard to take notes at these events. Diplomatic speech is very stylized, so you'll have a typical intervention which begins something like, "Mr. Chairman, allow me to congratulate you as I take the floor for the first time, on your reappointment to the chairmanship. I have every confidence that with your steady hand at the tiller, you'll guide us to a swift and full consensus on the issues at hand. The delegation from Lower Whatistan is pleased to take the floor." Und zo weiter. Eventually you get to the point, and after 20 minutes it boils down to, "No." Taking notes on that kind of speech is really grueling, because it's very hard to stay attentive and catch the one little phrase that has meaning.
So we'd have teams of three or four people using collaborative note-taking software, and one would be taking notes, one would be adding commentary and another would be following behind and correcting typos and formatting and the like. Meanwhile, we're all of us checking each other as we go -- filling in the blanks, noting discrepancies and so on -- and then publishing it twice a day at lunch and dinner.
Now, the delegations there were accustomed to the old WIPO regime, where the notes would be taken by the secretariat, sent out for approval by the delegates, sanitized -- all the bodies would be buried -- and then published six months later. And what happened once we started working together like this is that delegates would get calls on their lunch break about things they'd said that morning. Suddenly, they're immediately accountable for their words, which completely changed the character of the negotiations.
The usual: light-footed, distributed, collaborative openness beats leaden, monolithic and closed anyday.
In the dark, twisted world of copyright, one ray of light has been William Patry's blog. No more:I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years.
Although Google's top copyright man, he wrote his blog in a purely private capacity as one of the leading copyright scholars in the world. Indeed, despite his position at that company, he was remarkably approachable: when I asked him to do a quick email interview for this blog he readily agreed. Sadly, one answer has proved prophetic:I think copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions that the 18th century English common judges grasped intuitively. Our ability to adapt has been seriously hampered by trade agreements, and that's a big problem.
Indeed, Patry now feels that this crucial "balance of incentives and exceptions" has been lost to such an extent that he can no longer blog. Alongside the fact that people kept assuming his views were official Google policy (they weren't), his other reason for stopping was simply:The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
When one of the world's pre-eminent experts in the field is so depressed by the state of copyright that he can't bring himself to blog about it, you know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Thanks, Mr Patry, for all you gave, and sorry to see you go. Now it's up to us to carry on the fight for some copyright sanity.
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