The Free, Open Web: 20 Years of RF Licensing

As regular readers of this column know, there's still a battle going on over whether standards should be FRAND or restriction/royalty-free (RF). The folly of allowing standards to contain FRAND-licensed elements is shown most clearly by the current bickering between Microsoft and Google. What makes that argument such a waste of time and money is the fact that for 20 years we have had the most stunning demonstration of the power of RF:

 

On Open Enteprise blog.

Here's Another Inventor Who Willingly Gave Away His Greatest Idea In Order To Establish It As A Global Standard

Beyond the fact that you are using it to read these words, the Web has undeniably had a major impact on a large part of the world's population. It's certainly one of the greatest inventions of recent times, and as Techdirt has noted before, one of the reasons it has taken off in such an amazing way, and led to so many further innovations, is because Sir Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent it.

On Techdirt.

Exploring Anti-Net Neutrality Arguments

As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I thought it would be useful - and maybe entertaining - to look at an anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the other side views things. It's called "Pick Up On One and Let The Other One Ride", and appears in the Huffington Post. Here's how it frames the discussion:

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Politicians Don't Seem To Mind That Every Web Page You Load Is Copyright Infringement Under Current Law

Last year Techdirt wrote about the almost unbelievable Meltwater decision in the UK, where the courts said that viewing a Web page without the owner's permission was copyright infringement. In November last year, leave was granted to Meltwater to make an appeal against the ruling to the UK's Supreme Court. However, that still leaves the inconvenient matter of the infringement by tens of millions of UK Web users hundreds of times every day in the meantime. 

On Techdirt.

Tim Berners-Lee Says UK's Net Spying Plans Would Be 'Destruction Of Human Rights'

Not content with inventing the Web and then giving it away, Tim Berners-Lee remains highly active in warning about the threats the Internet and its users face. Most recently he has taken on the British government's disproportionate plans to store information about every email sent and Web page visited in the UK: 

On Techdirt.

XML People: Tim B on TimBL

Here's a rather wonderful document by Tim Bray, one of the key people in the XML world, and someone who evidently knows everyone else there:

XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long.

It's also really good for its witty pen portraits of XML notables. Here's a sample: Tim B on TimBL:

TimBL is thin, pale, and twitchy, a well-bred British baby-boomer who circumlocutes and temporizes and gets to the point slowly. Englishly, he deplores confrontation and can find a way to paint any blood-feud in the colours of unfortunate misunderstanding. His publications suggest strong idealism, an overriding vision of the future of information space. His detractors say he’s a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky. The McArthur foundation says he’s a genius. I can’t figure out what he’s getting at half the time, or why he does things, but I’ve known a couple of real geniuses and that’s not necessarily a symptom.

However, I take exception to that idea of TimBL being "a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky." Not so much because it's insulting Sir Tim, but because I think it misses the point entirely. Like RMS's, TimBL's greatest contribution is not actually technical: it is ethical.

Had he not put his code into the public domain - after briefly flirting with the idea of licensing it under the GNU GPL - the Web would not have become the greatest invention of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is for his inspired altruism that we salute Sir Tim - not for anything so trivial as a markup language.

Apache on the Up

Not much, mind you, but given that I commented when it was on the way down, it's only fair to point out moves in the other direction:

Apache continues its recovery after steep falls in share over the last eighteen months and is back over 50%. Its share had been negatively affected over that period by the increasing number of blog sites in the survey on large providers like Microsoft and Google, using their own server software. But it is also benefiting from growth at other blog providers like multiply.

How the Future Web Played Midwife to the IBM PC

Fascinating:

In 1978, I.B.M. was beginning to design its PC, which was a radical break for a company that had until then resisted open architectures and industry standards. Mr. Lowe invited Mr. Nelson to the company’s offices in Atlanta for a 90-minute presentation.

The resulting slide show, in which Mr. Nelson sketched out a world in which computer users would be able to retrieve information wherever they were, came as a shock to the blue-suited I.B.M. executives, Mr. Lowe said. It gave a hint of the world that the PC would bring, and even though the I.B.M.-ers were getting ready to transform a hobbyist business into one of the world’s major industries, they had no clue of the broader social implications.

In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Happy OneWebDay

Thanks, Tim.

CERN Re-invents Publishing - Again

The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Now the boys and girls at CERN are at it again, with a radical proposal that will re-invent scientific publishing in their field.

Essentially, they suggest that enough of the big particle physics establishments get together to sponsor the publication of most of the main titles in their field for the next few years as part of a transition to an open access approach, funded in part by savings on subscriptions. At a stroke this solves the biggest problem with OA - getting there.

Major laboratories such as CERN will have to take a lead initially in steering the community through the OA transition – both politically and financially – but ultimately the particle physics funding agencies will have to provide the lion’s share of the financial support. This accounts in particular for the fact that about 80% of the original research articles in particle physics are theory papers.

Tentatively, the task force envisages a transition period of five years to establish a ‘fair share’ scenario between funding agencies and other partners, to allow time for funding agencies to redirect budgets from journal subscriptions to OA sponsoring, and to allow time for more publishers to convert journals to OA. At the end of this period, the vast majority of particle physics literature should be available under an OA scheme.

The sums involved are big for publishing, but puny compared to the cost of your average accelerator, so it's a good mix. And they're thinking strategically too:

With about 10,000 practising scientists worldwide, particle physicists represent a medium-sized community that is small enough for publishers and funding agencies not to take incalculable risks, yet big enough to provide a representative test bed and to set a visible precedent for other fields of science and humanities.

In other words, if this works, the hope is everything else will come tumbling down too. This is one experiment I'll follow with interest. (Via Open Access News.)

Trouble at 't Mill

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the sticky stuff that holds the Web together; without it, the whole caboodle would slowly come unstuck, fraying into lots of proprietary strands.

So this kind of posting, which seems to indicate problems at the heart of the W3C, is deeply worrying:

I believe for our society to progress it's essential that our culture, our knowledge, and our society itself are as accessible as possible to everyone; web standards are how we choose to achieve this on the World Wide Web, and for us to communicate, especially if we have special needs or novel ideas about information access, it depends on compliance to web standards. With this in mind I became interested in assuring standards compliance on the Web and involved in the development of tools meant to help in this respect at the World Wide Web Consortium seven years ago.

I now have to discontinue my participation in this area at the W3C and would like to explain how the World Wide Web Consortium failed to provide what I think would have been and still is necessary to advance the tools and services to an acceptable level, which will explain why I am leaving now.

(Via Slashdot.)

The Commons Becomes Commoner

I've already written about how the "commons" meme is on the rise, with all that this implies in terms of co-operation, sharing and general open source-iness. Now here are two more.

The first is the Co-operation Commons, "an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation" (an excellent, fuller explanation can be found here). The second is the Credibility Commons, "an experimental environment enabling individuals the opportunity to try out different approaches to improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web."

As the commons becomes, er, commoner, I find that it is all just getting more and more interesting.