Something in the Air: the Open Source Way

One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen based on what has happened. But that clearly depends critically on your model. Improving the robustness of that model is an important aspect, and the coding practices employed obviously feed into that.

Here's a slightly old but useful paper [.pdf] that deals with just this topic:

In this paper, we report on a detailed case study of the Climate scientists build large, complex simulations with little or no software engineering training, and do not readily adopt the latest software engineering tools and tech-niques. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of the culture and practices of climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The study examined how the scientists think about software correctness, how they prioritize requirements, and how they develop a shared understanding of their models. The findings show that climate scientists have developed customized techniques for verification and validation that are tightly integrated into their approach to scientific research. Their software practices share many features of both agile and open source projects, in that they rely on self-organisation of the teams, extensive use of informal communication channels, and developers who are also users and domain experts. These comparisons offer insights into why such practices work.

It would be interesting to know whether the adoption of elements of the open source approach was a conscious decision, or just evolved.

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MakeHuman Makes Open Source More Human

One of the canards about open source is that it only produces hardcore hacker programs - dev tools, infrastructural stuff etc. - that have little to offer the general, non-technical, *normal* user. While that may have been true ten years ago, things have moved on.

For example, here's MakeHuman, an amazing program that lets you create photorealistic 3D humanoid characters:

MakeHuman is an open source (so it's completely free), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes; MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The MakeHuman 0.9.1 Release Candidate was published in December 2007, prompting considerable community feedback.

Development effort is currently focused on the 1.0 Release, based on a new GUI and a 4th generation mesh. This release also incorporates considerable changes to the code base which now uses a small, efficient core application written in C, with most of the user functionality being implemented in Python. Because Python is an interpreted scripting language, this means that a wide range of scripts, plugins and utilities can be added without needing to rebuild the application.

Even the alpha version is incredibly impressive - real drag and drop 3D humanoid manipulation (*very* eerie), with a simple-to-use interface. If you think that free software is only about important but boring stuff, try out MakeHuman, and be amazed.

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Water, Water, Everywhere - Linked by Open Source

Is there no domain in which open source is not storming ahead? What about this:

OpenMI stands for Open Modelling Interface and Environment, a standard for model linkage in the water domain.

Integrated catchment management asks for integrated analysis that can be supported by integrated modelling systems. These modelling systems can only be developed and maintained if they are based on a collection of interlinked models. OpenMI has been designed to provide a widely accepted unified method to link models, both legacy code and new ones.

To support those adopting the OpenMI, a set of tools has been developed to aid conversion, and simplify the configuration and running of linked models. These utilities make up the Open Modelling Environment. The commercial implications of the OpenMI have been considered both from the points of view of the vendors/suppliers of existing systems and the developers of new models and related tools. OpenMI avoids the need to abandon or rewrite current applications, thus protecting the huge investment in model development. Making a new component OpenMI compliant simplifies the process of bringing it to the market place and ensures it will be interoperable with many other systems.

And in case you were wondering:

The OpenMI source code is available under the GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Penguins Model Climate Change

A scientific project that will help govern how the European Commission tackles climate change is relying on Linux and the Géant academic grid to complete its vital work.

The Millennium Simulations, an earth modelling venture at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, will allow scientists to model the changes in the world's climate over the last millennium as well as centuries into the future.

By factoring in human influences on carbon, including changes in land use, as well as natural phenomena including volcanic activity, the Millennium Simulations will provide an insight into how the earth's climate will change over the coming decades and centuries.

It's this information that will go towards informing the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body whose information is fed to the highest levels of government to help them make decisions on the environment.

Open source *and* better climate change modelling - what's not to like?

Open Aladdin4D

I've written before about the example of Blender, and how it was freed from its proprietary shackles. Now it seems that another modelling program, Aladdin 4D, may also receive its manumission:

What is Aladdin 4D? It's a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you'd expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop.

Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine. Aladdin 4D has already had it's rendering engine test-compiled (a quick hack job) under Linux, MacOS X and other platforms in the past. The source code is highly standard C source code.

This would be great news. Great, because it reinforces this as a model for expanding open source; great because competition is good; and great because with the rise of virtual worlds (especially open ones), 3D modelling packages are going to become as common as HTML editors.

It's Academic

I know this is only a "stylized mathematical model" of how Windows and GNU/Linux interact in the marketplace, but it's more akin to a Swiss cheese model, so many holes does it exhibit. For example:

The model captures what we believe are the most important features of the Linux-Windows competitive battle (faster demand-side learning on the part of Linux and an initial installed base advantage for Windows), but makes important assumptions regarding other aspects.

"Faster demand-side learning" has almost nothing to do with it these days: issues like control, stability and security are more to the fore.

And then this is a completely erroneous assumption, too:

Our paper introduces a dynamic mixed duopoly model in which a profit-maximizing competitor (Microsoft) interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (Linux), with the installed base affecting their relative values over time.

Nobody equates GNU/Linux with zero price anymore: even if TCO is a slippery concept, it is certainly more realistic than simply looking at the price tag, as this study does.

And so on, and so on. The fundamental problem is that open source is driven by so many complex - and often non-economic - factors that any simplistic mathematical modelling is doomed to fail from the start.

Blender - Star of the First Open Source Film

Blender is one of the jewels in the open source crown. As its home page puts it:

Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

It's a great example of how sophisticated free software can be - if you haven't tried it, I urge you to do so. It's also an uplifing story of how going open source can really give wings to a project.

Now Blender is entering an exciting new phase. A few days ago, the premiere of Elephant's Dream, the first animated film made using Blender, took place.

What's remarkable is not just that this was made entirely with open source software, but also that the film and all the Blender files are being released under a Creative Commons licence - making it perhaps the first open source film.

Given that most commercial animation films are already produced on massive GNU/Linux server farms, it seems likely that some companies, at least, will be tempted to dive even deeper into free software and shift from expensive proprietary systems to Blender. Whether using all this zero-cost, luvvy-duvvy GPL'd software makes them any more sympathetic to people sharing their films for free remains to be seen....