All A-Twitter About Open Source

Here's a clever idea. For those - like myself - who don't Twitter, but want to keep up with the Twittersphere, Raven Zachary has put together a consolidated feed of some of the main open source Twitterers:

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

I particularly like the fact that I can subscribe to an RSS feed, which justs adds to flow of info that sloshes down every few minutes.

Nokia Buys Trolltech

On Open Enterprise blog.

Without Costing an Arm and a Leg

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wikia: Weak, but Working on It

So, the much-bruited Wikia has finally launched, in alpha at least:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

What's most interesting about this is how everything is merging into everything else: Wikipedia's co-founder is doing Wikia, Amazon has an on-demand cloud computing service, Google is beginning to enter the mobile phone business. Everyone is competing with everyone.

Vista's Problem: Microsoft Does Not Scale

It is deeply ironic that once upon a time Linux - and Linus - was taxed with an inability to scale. Today, though, when Linux is running everything from most of the world's supercomputers to the new class of sub-laptops like the Asus EEE PC and increasing numbers of mobile phones, it is Microsoft that finds itself unable to scale its development methodology to handle this range. Indeed, it can't even produce a decent desktop system, as the whole Vista fiasco demonstrates.

But the issue of scaling goes much deeper, as this short but insightful post indicates:

The world has been scaling radically since the Web first came on the scene. But the success of large, open-ended collaborations -- a robust operating system, a comprehensive encyclopedia, some "crowd-sourced" investigative journalism projects -- now is not only undeniable, but is beginning to shape expectations. This year, managers are going to have to pay attention.

Moreover, it points out exactly why scaling is important - and it turns out to be precisely the same reason that open source works so well (surprise, surprise):

The scaling is due to the basic elements in the Web equation: Lots of people, bazillions of pieces of information, and gigabazillions of links among them all. As more of the market, more of the supply chain, and more of the employees spend more of their time online, the scaled world of the Web begins to set the agenda for the little ol' real world.

Vodafone's Open Source Page

It's amazing where open source may lurk. Who would have thought that the mobile giant Vodafone had a page devoted to the subject? And yet it does. (Via Dana Blankenhorn.)

Mobilising Tim Berners-Lee

Tim on mobile openness:

On the opening day of Mobile Internet World in Boston, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web told a packed hall that the mobile Internet needs to be fully and completely the Internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards.

“The Web is an open platform on which you build other things,” he said. “That’s how you get this innovation. The Web is universal: you can run it on any hardware, on any operating system, it can be used by people of different languages…It’s a sandbox where people can [play and] exercise their creativity. It’s very important to keep the Web universal as we merge the Internet with mobile.”

Oh, Tell Me the Truth About Mobile

I don't really understand mobile, but I do understand its importance. So the news that the British company Volantis will be releasing a big gob of code as open source was clearly nice:

Volantis Systems, which provides the Intelligent Content Adaptation software delivering mobile content to more than 250 million mobile phone users worldwide, today eliminated price as a barrier to entry for companies that would like to capitalize on Volantis solutions to deliver content to mobile users. The Volantis Mobility Server is available immediately as a free download, and in the first quarter of 2008, Volantis will release the product under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version three, in the process contributing 1.2 million lines of code, based on seven years of development, to the community.

With more consumers and corporate customers moving toward the mobile Internet, enterprises need a simple way to build Web sites for mobile devices. Volantis Mobility Server provides an inexpensive path for companies to create this content and easily distribute it to the wide variety of mobile browsers on the market.

Which is all well and good, but couldn't you just do that with a CSS stylesheet? I asked Mark Watson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Volantis. He very kindly explained to me in words of one syllable why it was a smidge more complicated than that.

The basic problem is that there is no standard 640x480 resolution on mobile devices, which come in just about every shape and size imaginable, with handset manufacturers constantly adding more as they seek to differentiate their products from the others. This means that you need to reformat your Web stuff hundreds, if not thousands of times, depending on the device. And no, Google's Android doesn't really help here, because you've still got the hardware to cope with. This is clearly a pain, and where there is pain there is always a business opportunity to reduce that pain for gain - hence the existence of Volantis.

So, you might ask, why is Volantis giving away its crown jewels? The usual story: it currently has a number of jolly big customers, and thinks, probably rightly, that it will make more dosh if is has thousands of smaller customers. Since the latter are unlikely to fork out large sums for software, the code is going open source, with money made on services, as per usual.

Sounds sensible to me, but what do I know?

The Androids Are Coming

Well, they've arrived, actually, but what exactly does that mean? If you want to start to find out, the new Google site has plenty of technical info. Alternatively, for a more analytical perspective, there's a good piece at ONLamp.com, which draws on a chat with Mike Cleron, Senior Staff Engineer at Google and Technical Lead for Android.

Ubuntu Uber Alles

Can Ubuntu do no wrong? First Dell, now this:

To fulfil the aims of our mission and in response to the technical challenges that these devices pose, we are announcing the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project.

We will start more detailed planning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit next week in Seville and the first release of this edition will be in October with Ubuntu 7.10. If you are interested in the project, please get involved. We will be working through our normal development processes on Launchpad, the developer mailing lists and IRC.

Finally, we are delighted to be working with Intel on this version of Ubuntu. Intel are making significant contributions of technology, people and expertise to the project. We hope that others who are interested in producing an easy-to-use and open source environment for this class of device will join us in making this a success.

(Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

All A-twitter about Twitter

Like many, I've been following Twitter with interest, if a certain bemusement: just what is the attraction of knowing that your mates are drinking a cup of coffee or taking the dog for a walk?

This post provides perhaps the best explanations so far as to why Twitter is important:

You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

But will I use it? Not yet, although at some point I may dip a cyber-toe, as I have with LinkedIn: not because I need it, but because these social networks are indisputably an interesting trend.

Gating Technology: The E-Factor

I'm starting to write more posts about energy efficiency, since it obviously feeds into issues surrounding various environmental commons. But it's increasingly clear to me that its impact is going to be much more direct on the technologies I consider on a regular basis.

Take this, for example:

In a piece of research that could have implications for the future of mobile broadband, a US analyst firm has claimed that new mobile applications will make pure cellular technology too energy-inefficient to be practical in the future.

This is going to happen again and again, changing the course of technology development just when everyone thought they knew where it was going....

OpenMoko

iPhone? We don't need no stinkin' iPhone. We need this:

OpenMoko today announced the immediate availability of a completely integrated open source mobile communications platform in partnership with FIC, a world leader in motherboards, graphics cards, mobile solutions, and electronic devices. The announcement of the OpenMoko mobile communications platform coincides with the unveiling of FIC’s Neo1973 smartphone, which utilizes the full OpenMoko platform and will be available in January 2007.

Until now, mobile platforms have been proprietary and scattered. With the release of OpenMoko, which is based on the latest Linux open source efforts, developers now have an easy way to create applications and deliver services that span all users and provide a common “look and feel”. OpenMoko also offers common storage models and libraries for application developers, making writing applications for mobile phones fun and easy while guaranteeing swift proliferation of a wide range of applications for mobile phones. With such extremely high quality open frameworks, developers will be armed with exactly the tools they need to revolutionize the mobile industry.

(Via LWN.net.)

Open Source Software City: Foundations Laid

I've not mentioned Korea's open source software city before because details seemed rather scarce, and there are, after all, plenty of other cities using open source. Now, thanks to ZDNet Korea, we have something more, er, concrete:

Gwangju was designated as OSS City by Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) to bring up its economy and competitiveness through IT industry using open source to construct improved infrastructures in city's key industries like opto-electronics, automobile, mobile, and semiconductor.

The project with total cost of $45.7 million in three phases will run from 2006 to 2010. The first phase began in 2006 has completed Information Strategy Planning, surveying applicable open-source areas for the city to install open-source software as a main operating system of their infrastructures. Basing from the findings the open-source solutions were applied to Gwangju Information & Culture Industry Promotion Agency and Jeonnam girl's commercial high school giving channel to produce specialists through education sector.

(Via LXer.)

Sharing: As Natural as Childhood

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

...

Almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to.

Inevitably this story is provoking howls from the music industry. But it teaches us two things.

First, that - just as RMS has always said - sharing is natural, part of our genetic make-up that allows us to function as social beings. And secondly, that this is an opportunity, not a threat: these children are doing free marketing for the music companies, spreading the word about cool music. Copyright owners should rejoice, not fret about it - and move on to coming up with a way to make some money selling more music off the back of all this fantastic viral distribution.

Gutenberg on Your Mobile

Here are 5000 free Gutenberg texts converted into a format suitable for reading on your a mobile. (Via The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter.)

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.