United Nations of Free Software

Here's a useful round-up of free software projects at the United Nations - there's more than you might think. Pity that this section is so mealy-mouthed:

Most of the traditional software industry has its base in the developed world; there is concern that promoting FOSS could hurt this industry. From the developing countries' perspective, however, FOSS is a way to introduce competition in order to lower costs and expand options. The different views of the role of software in development have hindered the UN's ability to create a single coherent strategy for FOSS to apply to all member states.

Free software does not "hurt" the traditional industry, it merely brings a much-needed balance between users and suppliers. Business models may change, but as IBM and others have shown, there's plenty of money to be made under this new regime. To phrase it in terms of "hurt" gives succour to outdated and paternalistic practices that have no place in the new computing landscape.

First Catch Your Neanderthal

This stuff is getting too easy.

First, find some ancient remains - Croatian Neanderthal bones are great. Next, sequence lots - at least 20 times coverage. Don't worry if all you're getting are tiny fragments with around 100 DNA letters, and the signal is vastly swamped by bacterial noise. Just bung the results into a computer, and tell it (a) to cancel out all bacterial genome sequences (b) to join up all the rest. Result: one Neanderthal genome.

There's just one problem:

If the Neanderthal genome were fully recovered, it might in principle be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. There would, however, be great technical and ethical barriers to any such venture.

Understatement of the Year, Number 369.

Open Source Planes

First cars, then trains, now planes. New Scientist is reporting that it is now possible to create almost an entire plane by "printing" the components:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part - a wing strut, say - is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Two things are interesting here. First, this is precisely what Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, has been predicting for years. Indeed, he sees Project Gutenberg, which essentially lets you print your own books, as just the first, quite small step in the next industrial revolution, where physical objects will be printed routinely.

Secondly, note that the parts are printed under the control of a software program. So if the program and the data are open, this means that effectively the physical object will also be open. As usual, openness brings with it all the usual advantages of speed and lack of redundancy - you can re-use parts or parts of parts in other designs to create quickly entirely new objects.

The Office of Intellectual Monopolies

The group behind the Adelphi Charter has apparently proposed that the UK Patent Office be replaced with an Office of Intellectual Property:

The proposed new statutory body, the Office of Intellectual Property, with the suggested acronym OfIP, would cover all kinds of IP, including copyright and patents, and would have to report annually to the British Parliament on its activity, said John Howkins, director of the Creative Economy Forum, which put forward the proposal. The forum is a group of international IP experts - business, academics, non-governmental organisation representatives - interested in the creative economy.

An interesting idea, though I'm not wild about enshrining the term "intellectual property" in the title: how about the Office of Intellectual Monopolies? That's got a nice Orwellian ring about it.

The Open Body, Biometric Spoofing and ID Cards

Our bodies are open. That is, unless we are planning some criminal activity, we do not try to hide the basic physical facts about ourselves - our voice, our face, our eyes, our fingerprints. Unfortunately, these are precisely the characteristics that biometric ID schemes depend on for verification. This is tantamount to walking around with a large sign saying "my password is xxxx".

And this isn't just my opinion. Here's what one Bori Toth, biometric research and advisory lead at Deloitte & Touche, no less, has to say on the subject:

Many people are trying to regard biometrics as secret but they aren't. Our faces and irises are visible and our voices are being recorded. Fingerprints and DNA are left everywhere we go and it's been proved that these are real threats.

So the use of precisely these spoofable biometrics is just one more reason to bin the whole idiotic ID card idea, which rather depends on them being foolproof. (Via Slashdot.)

OOo or Aaargh!?

Here's a good analysis and general round-up of why Microsoft's decision to produce an extremely spiffy and completely different interface for Office 2007 was as bad a move as a very bad move can be. For me, the killer quote is:

OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office Currently Look More Similar Than Office 2003 and Office 2007
Training your users to go from Office 2003, or before, to OpenOffice.org, might be easier than teaching them the whole new Office 2007 system.

Just how easy is Microsoft trying to make the decision to jump to OpenOffice.org?

10 (More) Things to Build Blog Readership

I only mention this because it's similar to my own list from February. Well, similar and better, actually. (Via C|net.)

Open Innovation...

...is all very well, but will only work properly if attitudes to current intellectual monopolies change. Simply licensing stuff to and from others will prove too sclerotic without a radical simplification in the area of patents.

What is needed is a commons-based approach, where most ideas are available for all to use: then the value is added in the way ideas are combined, not just in coming up with them in the first place.

Tanenbaum Rides Again

For younger readers of this blog, the name Andy Tanenbaum may not mean much. But for oldies such as myself, it is highly redolent of those epic days when Linux was but a fledgling kernel, and taunts like "your mother was a hamster" and "Linux is obsolete" were thrown down like gauntlets.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Tanenbaum for my book Rebel Code, and it was fascinating to learn how close he came to creating what we now call GNU/Linux with his Minix. But Tanenbaum failed to do one crucial thing that Linus did almost without thinking: to let go. Understandably, as a professor of computer science Tanenbaum wanted to keep control of his teaching materials. But that one, tiny, reasonable brake was enough to stunt the growth of Minix and lend wings to Linux when it appeared in 1991.

Tanenbaum is still teaching, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (another Dutch story, then - must be the Rembrandt Effect), and I was interested to note this piece about some of his recent work on developing an anti-RFID device. Good to see him still moving forward in his work. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Not-So-Naked Conversations

A short, but interesting reflection on the changing nature of conversations - naked and not-so-naked. The key point:

The bottom line is that technology ushers in new forms of social organization that escape notice precisely because they are invisible to adherents of the old paradigm.

Something's Rotten in the Domain Name System

Although I can't quite claim to go back to the very first commercial domain, I do remember the Wired story about how many major US corporations had neglected to register relevant domains. And I also remember how around $7.5 million was paid for the utterly generic and pointless business.com domain.

So I've seen a thing or two. And yet I can still be disgusted by the depths to which the scammers can sink when it comes to domain names. Try this, for example: a company that seems to be magically reserving domain names shortly after people have entered them as a Whois search - only to dump it if it doesn't pull in any traffic.

It's this kind of parasitical business model that is pushing the domain name system close to breakdown, and making the Internet far less efficient than it could be.

OpenOffice.org Goes Dutch

Just in time for Rembrandt's 400th birthday, here's some good news from Holland:

De gemeente Groningen heeft besloten om een overeenkomst met Microsoft voor de levering van de Office-suite van de softwaregigant te laten verlopen. De noordelijke gemeente heeft namelijk besloten om over te stappen op het opensourcepakket OpenOffice.org. Hiermee is de gemeente Groningen volgens eigen zeggen de grootste gemeente in Nederland die serieus met opensourcesoftware aan de slag gaat.

Which, I think, says (roughly) that the northern Dutch municipality Groningen has decided not to renew its contract with Microsoft for Office, but to go with OpenOffice.org, confirming Groningen's position as the open source leader in Dutch local government.

What's interesting is that it's OpenOffice.org that's driving open source uptake again. Sure, Firefox is more widely used, but it rarely figures as a conscious decision. And it's certainly not one that loses Microsoft any revenue (though its managers probably lose some sleep), as OpenOffice.org will in Groningen, to the tune of 330,000 Euros. (Via LXer.)

Bill Gates Wants to Share "Openly"

It looks like Bill Gates is one step closer to getting it. According to this press release from his foundation, regarding a major research grant to create a series of research consortia to accelerate HIV vaccine development:

These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development.

...

As a condition for receiving funding, the newly-funded vaccine discovery consortia have agreed to use the central facilities to test vaccine candidates, share information with other investigators, and compare results using standardized benchmarks.

In other words, Gates is demanding open data sharing, and maybe open access too (it's not clear yet, as Peter Suber notes).

But this is a slippery slope, Bill: once you accept the inherent efficiency of sharing data "openly", as the press release emphasises, it's only a short conceptual leap before you find yourself accepting and then encouraging the other ways of sharing stuff "openly"....

No Comment, No MT et al.

Comments are the ichor that courses through the blogosphere's veins. A blog with no comments is probably dead, and a blogger that doesn't comment on the blogs of others probably needs to get out more.

But if it's hard enough keeping track of all the interesting things happening so that you can blog about some of them, keeping track of all the comments to your comments has been practically impossible. No longer. As this TechCrunch piece notes , there are now no less than three rival services that will help you track comments. Maybe I ought to try one.

Virtually Spot On

I have to admit that I tend to read The Reg more for its entertainment value than for its incisive analysis (with the honorable exception of John Lettice's pieces on ID cards, which always manage to be worth reading on both counts). But there's no doubt that sometimes there's some sharp thinking as well as sharp writing.

Like this piece on Microsoft's snuggle-up with XenSource in the field of server virtualisation:

Knowing that it can't compete in the market in the interim, Microsoft has played the old IBM trick of creating confusion. Don't go with VMware. Go with XenSource. That's who we like. Have a look at what they have to offer.

Spot on.

Blooks Like the Future

Blooks are generally blogs turned into books, but I suppose we can stretch the term to include books that are available from blogs. Here's a heartening story about the latter type.

A novelist became fed up waiting for an agent or publisher to deign to acknowledge his existence (don't we all know it?). So he did the obvious thing: bunged it up on his Web site for anyone to download. His reasoning?

I'm putting this full-length novel online and encouraging you to read it, send it to your friends, blog about it, distribute it on your blogs, etc. and we'll all see what happens. Maybe nothing. But maybe ... something. In fact after weighing the pros and cons of doing this, I can't find any actual downside.

I wrote The Agency Delta because I had a story. Now I want people to read it. I think it's a great story. Now tell me what you think.

This is the future, you writer people. (Via Self Publish Blooks.)

Indian Summer of Code

I wrote earlier today about the fallacy of assuming that once you start offering money the spirit that informs the world of collaborative efforts like open content evaporates, leaving crass cupidity. It occurred to me afterwards, that we have already been here before.

Back in 1998, the first wave of open source IPOs hit. One of the main beneficiaries of the VA Linux IPO was Eric Raymond. As he wrote at the time:

A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich. ... VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.

He then turns away from this typically self-centred story to examine (with characteristic insight) the wider implications of the IPOs that were happening:

Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things -- accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.

This is still true. As proof, witness the Season of KDE 2006:

As in 2005, KDE again was a participating organization in this years Google Summer of Code 2006. Many interesting and much needed project ideas were submitted and students from all over the world began to apply for them. The KDE project received more than 200 student applications. Sadly Google's capacities are not limitless and thus, only 24 students were selected to participate in Google's Summer of Code under the mentorship of the KDE project.

Driven by the urge not to let many good applications go to waste the KDE project decided to give many of the rejected students a chance to realize their ideas after all in the first Season of KDE. Since KDE does not have Google's financial capacities the students will not get paid for their efforts. Still it is a very good opportunity for students to get involved in KDE development while being mentored by an experienced KDE developer and as a result be an active part of the Free Software Community.

In other words, no Google moolah is flowing, but the aspirants coders are still coding - out of sheer hacker love. Kudos to the students for doing so, and to their mentors for giving their time. That's what this open stuff is all about.

Free Software is Trendy

Like many, I've had great fun playing around with Google Trends. The tricky thing is trying to find something sensible to say about what you find there. Luckily, when it comes to GNU/Linux and related matters, Steven Vaughan-Nichols has already done it.

Open Source, Meet the Mainstream

Matthew Aslett usefully flags up in his blog the rise and rise of open source in canonical top ten lists of computing - like the one is his own title, Computer Business Review. Yes, it's all arbitrary of course, but is always has been; so the appearance of open sourcey-ness all over the place is symptomatic, if nothing else.

(Parenthetically, I was pleased to see Angela Eager mentioned in his post: I gave Angela one of her first jobs in tech journalism a couple of geological epochs ago. It's good to see that training stood her in good stead.)

Open Content: Some Get It, Some Don't

Larry Sanger (who does) explains to Jason Calcanis (who doesn't) what all this open content is really about - and why it isn't going away once companies start waving fistfuls of dosh in the air.

Why Linus Still Matters

A little while ago I wrote about a slightly provocative list from Business 2.0 that suggested that a certain Linus Torvalds doesn't really matter any more. Joe Barr has followed this up with a hilarious exchange with The Man to find out his feelings on the same. An excerpt:

NewsForge: Have you really made a billion dollars from Linux?

Torvalds: No. Linux was just the cover story. I made all my money smuggling drugs while traveling to international conferences under the guise of talking about "the future of technology" or some such tripe.

It's wit like this that shows most clearly why Linus does matter. (Via fUSION Anomalog.)

ODF Viewer for Firefox

As ODF continues its long march to conquer the world, the number of ODF documents that you come across online will increase. This makes an ODF Viewer for Firefox an indispensable tool. And there's one on the way - but be careful, it's alpha code only at the moment. (Via Bob Sutor's Blog.)

The Open Source Mesh Begins to Mesh

I'm a big fan of open source meshes, with their potential to offer alternative ways of accessing the Internet. I'd not heard of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network before, but this story on GigaOM about serious NSF backing for work on an open source mesh network looks promising.

Open Access to Open Access, the Book

An important new collection of essays on open access has been published. It's called Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Hearteningly, most of the chapters have been self-archived by the authors: kudos to them for doing so, and to Chandos Publishing for being enlightened enough to allow it. (via Open Access News.)

ODF a Standard in Malaysia?

The word is spreading: it seems that ODF is likely to become a standard in Malaysia, too. (Via Bob Sutor's Blog.)