Michael Hart (1947 - 2011): Prophet of Abundance

I've never written an obituary before in these pages. Happily, that's because the people who are driving the new wave of openness are relatively young, and still very much alive. Sadly, one of the earliest pioneers, Michael Hart, was somewhat older, and died on Tuesday at the age of just 64.

What makes his death particularly tragic is that his name is probably only vaguely known, even to people familiar with the areas he devoted his life to: free etexts and the public domain. In part, that was because he modest, content with only the barest recognition of his huge achievements. It was also because he was so far ahead of his times that there was an unfortunate disconnect between him and the later generation that built on his trailblazing early work.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Come to the World eBook Fair

Every year, some of the top ebook companies and organisations come together to offer extremely large numbers of ebooks, absolutely free (mostly as in beer, but often as in freedom) as part of the World eBook Fair. Here are the facts and figures:

Third Annual World eBook Fair: July 4th to August 4th

Just two years ago The First World eBook Fair came on the scene with about 1/3 million books, doubled to 2/3 million in 2008, and now over one million.

Created by contributions from 100+ eLibraries from around the world, here are the largest collections.

As of midnight Central Daylight Time July 4, 2008 these are the approximate numbers:

100,000+ from Project Gutenberg
500,000+ from The World Public Library
450,000+ from The Internet Archive
160,000+ from eBooks About Everything

..17,000+ from IMSLP

1,227,000+ Grand Total

Pretty impressive.

And while we're on the subject of free, here is a good list of "100+ Sources for Free-As-In-Beer Books & Texts Online", which includes a lot of fairly obscure but highly worthy sites. Recommended.

Gawd Bless Project Gutenberg

I wrote recently about the tragedy of losing the IMSLM music score commons. Well, it looks like Mr Digital Commons himself, Michael Hart (he was the first, remember - Project Gutenberg began over a decade before GNU) has stepped in with a great offer to take it under his wing:

Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSLM Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.

This is a doubly good outcome: all that hard work is not lost, and it gets better infrastructure (and probably more access to legal advice.) (Via Slashdot.)

Open Source Planes

First cars, then trains, now planes. New Scientist is reporting that it is now possible to create almost an entire plane by "printing" the components:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part - a wing strut, say - is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Two things are interesting here. First, this is precisely what Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, has been predicting for years. Indeed, he sees Project Gutenberg, which essentially lets you print your own books, as just the first, quite small step in the next industrial revolution, where physical objects will be printed routinely.

Secondly, note that the parts are printed under the control of a software program. So if the program and the data are open, this means that effectively the physical object will also be open. As usual, openness brings with it all the usual advantages of speed and lack of redundancy - you can re-use parts or parts of parts in other designs to create quickly entirely new objects.

Open Nanotech

Normally I wouldn't pay much attention to this story about producing mechanical components with industrial printers:

the company builds components by piling thin, patterned layers of ceramics, metals and other materials on top of each other and curing the individual layers as the structure takes shape.

These printed components, which consist of hundreds of layers, can also contain fully integrated moving parts, hinges or sealed air chambers.

What leant this otherwise routine piece of nanotech fluff some interest was a comment made last night by Alan Cox, for a long time de facto number 2 of the Linux kernel, and still very much a big cheese in the open source world (and a nice bloke too).

He was speaking at a question and answer session arranged by the British Computer Society's Open Source Specialist Group. Also present was Mark Taylor, founder and President of the Open Source Consortium, very plugged-in and switched-on, and a coder-turned-lawyer called Andrew Katz, whom I'd not met before.

Alan mentioned the idea of printing arbitrary objects one day, in exactly the manner described by the C|net piece above. I asked him whether he'd been talking with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who espouses similar ideas rather more fervently - indeed, he says that Project Gutenberg's open content is only the start of the the next industrial revolution, when everything - as in every kind of analogue object - will be downloadable and printable.

When two such different individuals have a blue-sky vision so similar, it makes you stop and think.

It's worth noting that open nanotech will have a huge advantage over proprietary versions, since the whole benefit from the technology will be putting together microscopic elements to build something useful. If each sub-part is proprietary and/or patented, it will be a legal minefield. If the elements are open and patent-free, the only limit is your imagination.

It's Blogging - But Not As We Know It

A few weeks ago I interviewed Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. As I wrote in the article that resulted, there are close similarities between him and Richard Stallman. Both have conducted a single-minded - not to say lonely - campaign for their respective projects, both have achieved miracles, and both are, er, colourful characters.

In the course of my discussions with him, I recommended that he start blogging. He has been a prolific and fascinating wordsmith for decades, but I thought that the medium of the blog would allow him to reach out to new audiences.

So I was intrigued to receive an email from him recently in which he spoke about a new introduction to his blog. As you will see, this is an interesting interpretation of the blog format - a kind of retro 70s ASCII blog.

But don't let that put you off. What Hart has to say is interesting and important. Indeed, I think he will go down in history as a highly significant figure. Even if he has unconventional ideas on blogging - and on much else.