Showing posts with label open web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open web. Show all posts

10 March 2013

BBC Attacks the Open Web, GNU/Linux in Danger

The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:

On Open Enterprise blog.

02 July 2011

The Rise and Fall and Rise of HTML

HTML began life as a clever hack of a pre-existing approach. As Tim Berners-Lee explains in his book, “Weaving the Web”:

Since I knew it would be difficult to encourage the whole world to use a new global information system, I wanted to bring on board every group I could. There was a family of markup languages, the standard generalised markup language (SGML), already preferred by some of the world's top documentation community and at the time considered the only potential document standard among the hypertext community. I developed HTML to look like a member of that family.

On The H Open.

09 March 2011

Mozilla Moves On

Back in August last year, I wrote the following:

we no longer live in a simple binary world of Internet Explorer as the dominant player and Firefox as the doughty but distant challenger. We are entering a new situation with three powerful players all striving to impress users with their respective strengths and capabilities, each sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a little market share.

In this sense, Mozilla has won, because this kind of healthy competition was precisely what it was trying to achieve when it launched its open source browser project over a decade ago. It has also won in the sense that Internet Explorer is now much more compliant with open Web standards, and seems unlikely to try to lock down the Internet again with its own proprietary add-ons as it did successfully during the dotcom boom. As a result, it's probably fair to say that with its relatively static market share, what we are seeing is not so much the beginning of the end for Firefox, just the end of the beginning where it was the plucky underdog able to ride an easy wave of browser rebellion.

But if this is the end of the beginning, what comes next?

On Open Enterprise blog.

22 February 2010

Let My Codecs Go: Will Google Free VP8?

I've written about the growing interest in HTML 5 a couple of times, and there is a parallel discussion around the role, if any, of Flash and its proprietary codecs in an Open Web. And now, hidden away in this dull press release from Google, we have another ingredient added to the bubbling cauldron...

On Open Enterprise blog.

30 June 2009

Winning the Open Web

It seems an unfair fight. On the one hand, you have some of the biggest, most powerful multinationals, intent on defending their turf and extending their power and profits. On the other, you have a tiny number of ragtag idealists who believe that knowledge belongs to everyone, and that no one should have disproportionately long monopolies on its supply.

And yet: in the last few years a remarkable series of victories have been one by the latter against the former, to the extent that representatives of the big media industries have warned that they are losing the "battle".

Against that background of uneven forces - but not quite in the way the media companies mean it - sharing information about past successes so as to drive future ones is crucially important. And yet it is rarely done, probably because the practitioners are too busy fighting the battles to write about it.

Enter Becky Hogge, former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, who happily has had some time on her hands to prepare a handy report entitled "Winning the Web":


Winning the Web is a 2009 report funded by the Open Society Institute and written by Becky Hogge, former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group. It examined 6 successful campaigns for intellectual property reform, in Brazil, Canada, the US, France, New Zealand, and the UK.

Lessons drawn from the study of the campaigns include the importance of coalition-forming, the best way to conduct online mobilisation campaigns, and the need for a more unified critique of current intellectual property regimes.

The introduction fleshes out the idea:

The global intellectual property regime is no longer fit for purpose. As the networked, digital age matures, it puts into the hands of millions of citizens the tools to access create and share “content”: text, pictures, music and video; data, news, analysis and art. Against this, the intellectual property regime falters. It presents citizens with a choice: stop using the technology – stop communicating, stop creating – or break the law.

Legal reform is presented with two separate challenges. The first is a small but vocal minority of entrenched corporate interests – the rightsholder lobby. Wedded to business models that pre-date the age of networked digital technology, they exploit their position as incumbents to influence legislators. Often representing the world’s biggest multinational corporations, they hijack a narrative that belongs to poor artists struggling in garrets and use the considerable profits they have made from exploiting these artists in the twentieth century to access the corridors of power and make their case.

That legislators listen is related to a second, geopolitical, challenge. Since the 1970s, the developed world has sought to use the global intellectual property regime to ensure its continued prosperity. Motivated by the ability of developing countries to undercut it on the global manufacturing market, it has sought to augment the financial privilege afforded to “knowledge workers”. The self-interest behind this practice is masked by a flawed orthodoxy that is rarely backed up by evidence – that more intellectual property provision is always good for economic growth.

Against this backdrop, a global IP reform movement (also called the access to knowledge movement) is emerging. Motivated by a range of concerns – from global justice, to the narrowing spectrum of permitted speech, to the broadening of surveillance power – these individuals and organisations approach their campaigning work with combined levels of ingenuity and intellectual rigour that make them stand out in the history of fledgling civil rights movements. Recently, these pockets of activism have taken IP reform issues to a wide audience, triggering sweeping civic action in the general population.

For me, the best bits are the detailed case studies of successful campaigns around the world. I knew the bare outlines, but the report really fleshes these out, and then uses them to provide concrete suggestions of what lessons can be learned for the future.

There's one other point is one that I've long thought absolutely crucial:

In the UK, citizens can engage with their elected representatives (including MEPs) using a one-click service called WriteToThem.com. Jim Killock is keen to stress that it is vital that such a tool be developed for all EU member states:

Writetothem.eu is absolutely critical if we want to run these campaigns in the next four years. It shows the contempt in which we seem to hold our European institutions and the irrelevance that they are felt to have across Europe.

This really must be a priority, or else all future campaigns in Europe will suffer as a result.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

13 February 2009

What Mozilla's Bespin Bespeaks

One of the most interesting developments in the open source world is the way that Mozilla has changed in recent years. What started out as a (slightly shambolic) attempt to hack a decent browser out of the wreckage of the Netscape Communicator code, has turned into arguably one of the two or three most important forces in free software today (you can draw up your own list)....

On Open Enterprise blog.

14 October 2008

Birth of a Meme: the O(o)pen Web

One of the interesting slogans that the Mozilla Foundation has been pushing a lot recently is the idea of the “open Web”. That's clearly distinct from an *open source* Web, but the latter is more or less predicated on the former, since a Web that isn't open is hardly going to be very welcoming to open code....

On Open Enterprise blog.

13 May 2007

A Flash of Recognition

Now, where have I heard this before?

I assert that there is something wrong with web-like "rich" formats that aren't hyperlink-able or indexable by search-engines. You could argue that these bugs could be fixed, and Flash is wisely becoming more URI-addressable and view-source-able over time. But it still ain't the Web. It is not hand-authored, easily tweaked incrementally, copy-and-paste-able. It's hardware.

Oh, yes, I remember:

I hate Flash animations even more: they are not only opaque - there is no cyber-there there - they are barriers to my free navigation of the Web and waste my time as they download. In effect, they turn the Web into television.

Well, television is, indeed, hardware.

16 April 2007

Open Web Initiative

What is Open Web?

Open Web is a collection of technologies and standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

What is NOT Open Web?

Anything that is proprietary, locked in in format or provider is NOT Open Web. Open Web is about open, extensible, and license free standards.

In short this is a collection of technologies and open standards that enable individuals to disclose their identity, feeds, activities, friends, and social networks, while preserving their ownership over this information and enabling them to keep their privacy.

Sounds good to me. (Via Vecosys.)