Open Sourcing America's Operating System

And how do you do that? By making all of the laws freely available - and, presumably, searchable and mashable:

Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we're going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

This is great news, because Carl Malamud - the force behind this initiative - has been urging it for years: now it looks like it's beginning to take a more concrete form:

The process we're going through to create the case for Law.Gov is a series of workshops hosted by our co-conveners. At the end of the process, we're submitting a report to policy makers in Washington. The process will be an open one, so that in addition to the main report which I'll be authoring, anybody who wishes to submit their own materials may do so. There is no one answer as to how the raw materials of our democracy should be provided on the Internet, but we're hopeful we're going to be able to bring together a group from both the legal and the open source worlds to help crack this nut.

I particularly liked the following comment:

Law.Gov is a big challenge for the legal world, and some of the best thinkers in that world have joined us as co-conveners. But, this is also a challenge for the open source world. We'd like to submit such a convincing set of technical specs that there is no doubt in anybody's mind that it is possible to do this. There are some technical challenges and missing pieces as well, such as the pressing need for an open source redaction toolkit to sit on top of OCR packages such as Tesseract. There are challenges for librarians as well, such as compiling a full listing of all materials that should be in the repository.

What's interesting is that this recognises that open source is not just an inspiration, but a key part of the solution, because - like the open maths movement I wrote about below - it needs new kinds of tools, and free software is the best way to provide them.

Now, if only someone could do something similar in the UK....

The Operating System as Prison

Microsoft's OS as prison [according to Linux Foundation's king of kings, Jim Zemlin]:

These prison facilities are horrible. This is the largest, most difficult prison to escape from in the world but the security is horrible. Everyone is stealing each other’s data and you are sharing a cell with an angry 300 pound piece of malware. The prison warden, Steve Ballmer, walks around often claiming he wants a kinder gentler and more open prison, but everyone knows he is lying.

Apple:

Each cell is a plush luxury suite overlooking the ocean. You can get movies ordered to your room all day and the music selection is great. Your cell mates are cool hipsters and they have great parties that last all night long. It is almost like staying at a five star hotel with the only catch being that you can’t ever leave.

Sun Solaris:

This prison seems desolate and strangely empty.

Ha!

Going a Bundle on Unbundling

I can't see this happening, but it's interesting that someone has even raised it:

This paper’s recommendation is that the European Commission should require all desktop and laptop computers sold within the EU to be sold without operating systems.

For two decades, Microsoft has enjoyed monopolistic power in the operating system market. The Competition Commissioner has signalled the desire to see more competition in this sector. Unbundling would foster a competitive market, increase consumer choice and reduce prices.

It's the Platform, Stupid

If you needed proof that operating systems were really irrelevant these days, try this:

When Facebook announced its platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience, Facebook, in essence, became the Social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or a platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications.

The AppFactory provides funding, technical and business resources to help entrepreneurs identify, build, and monetize the next generation of applications. Since AppFactory investments are really bets on people and concepts, Bay will use an aggressive timeline and fast-track approach to awarding AppFactory funding. An entrepreneur's time is best spent developing the application and experimenting with variables that affect adoption, virality, and usage, while exploring reasonable theories about monetization.

That is, we're no longer looking at the OS-independent browser as a platform, but as a browser-independent social network as a platform - insulating the user even further from the operating system. What's next, an ecosystem based around a Facebook app? (Via TechCrunch.)

The Bad Boy of Genomics Strikes Again

When I was writing Digital Code of Life, I sought to be scrupulously fair to Craig Venter, who was often demonised for his commercial approach to science. Ind fact, it seemed to me he had often gone out of his way to make the results of his work available.

So it's with some sadness that I note that the "Bad Boy of Genomics" epithet seems justified in this more recent case:

A research institute has applied for a pat­ent on what could be the first largely ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism. And peo­ple should be al­armed, claims an ad­vo­ca­cy group that is try­ing to shoot down the bid.

...

The ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism, a mere mi­crobe, is the brain­child of re­search­ers at the Rock­ville, Md.-based J. Craig Ven­ter In­sti­tute. The or­gan­iz­a­tion is named for its found­er and CEO, the ge­net­icist who led the pri­vate sec­tor race to map the hu­man ge­nome in the late 1990s.

The re­search­ers filed their pat­ent claim on the ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism and on its ge­nome. Ge­net­i­cally mo­di­fied life forms have been pa­tented be­fore; but this is the first pa­tent claim for a crea­ture whose genome might be created chem­i­cally from scratch, Mooney said.

This is problematic on a number of levels. For a start, it shouldn't be possible to patent DNA, since it is not an invention. Simply combining existing sequences is not an invention either. There is also the worry that what is being created here is the first genomic operating system: locking others out with patents maans repeating all the mistakes that have been made in some jurisdictions by allowing the patenting of conventional software.

One Door Closes, Another Door Opens

Tomorrow is the end of an era - though you might be forgiven if you failed to notice. Back in July, IBM announced that it was ending support for its OS/2 operating system.

Now, for younger readers, this may not mean much: after all, few today use OS/2. But once upon a time, OS/2 was the Great White Hope - not just for IBM, but apparently for Microsoft too. Both positioned it as the "serious" version of Windows, which was merely a kind of mickey-mouse entry-level system. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way.

What's amazing is not so much that Microsoft managed to outwit IBM (again - after doing it for the first time with MS-DOS), but that IBM stuck with its poor old OS/2 for so long. What's also interesting - and yet another straw in the wind - is that in its migration page, IBM suggests GNU/Linux as the most natural successor.

But it is much more than merely a make-do substitute. OS/2 being closed, dies tomorrow. The open GNU/Linux can never die (though it might go into hibernation). A similar observation was made by this perceptive story on lwn.net in the context of browsers, rather than operating systems.