The Euston Manifesto

After the right espousing open source and related open goodness yesterday, today we have the left. More specifically, we have something called The Euston Manifesto (via Compromiso Social por la Ciencia). This may sound a bit like an Ealing Comedy, but it includes the following rather surprising paragraph:

14) Open source.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.

Amazon Plays Tag, Blog and Wiki

For all its patent faults, Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites. It has repeatedly done the right thing when mistakes have been made with my orders, to the extent that I can even forgive them for doing the wrong thing when it comes to (IP) rights....

So I was interested to see that Amazon.com now lets users add tags to items: I first noticed this on Rebel Code, where some public-minded individual has kindly tagged it as open source, free software and linux. Clicking on one of these brings up a listing of other items similarly tagged (no surprise there). It also cross-references this with the customers who used this tag, and the other tags that are used alongside the tag you are viewing (a bit of overkill, this, maybe).

I was even more impressed to see a ProductWiki at the foot of the Rebel Code page (it's rather empty at the moment). This is in addition to the author's blog (which I don't have yet because Amazon insists on some deeply arcane rite to establish I am really the Glyn Moody who wrote Rebel Code and not his evil twin brother from a parallel universe). Mr. Bezos certainly seems to be engaging very fully with the old Web 2.0 stuff; it will be interesting to see how other e-commerce sites respond.

Bloggers Do It Openly

So bloggers do matter after all, according to this Guardian piece. That there exist groups of people who wield a power disproportionate to their numbers is nothing new: it has happened throughout history. What's novel here is that this is being done in a completely transparent way, whereas in the past all the discussions and verbal derring-do would have happened behind closed doors.

So say what you like about bloggers - and heavens knows, I've done my bit - at least they do it openly.

Their Words, Not Mine

Since this whole blog is predicated on the commonality that exists between open source, open genomics, open access, open content, and open blah-blah-blah, my own posts that argue for the power of openness will hardly come as a surprise.

So it is always handy when I can point to somebody else who is saying exactly the same thing - particularly because in this case that "somebody else" is about as far as you can get from your stereotypical sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading, weedy liberal.

It comes from the US Committee of Economic Development - "the best of business thinking", no less - which "has addressed national priorities that promote sustained economic growth and development to benefit all Americans," apparently, so nothing wishy-washy there, then.

And yet its latest report is entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness. Its peroration is positively dithyrambic:

Openness is not an overriding moral value that must prevail in every circumstance. But, its extraordinary capability to harness the collective intelligence of our world requires us to consider its implications carefully, nurture it where possible, and avoid efforts to foreclose it without compelling reason. We should not miss the opportunity to harvest the benefits openness might bring.

Their words, not mine.

Lear's Fool, Mac OS X, Windows and Open Source

Misled by his intentionally-provocative columns, people tend to treat John Dvorak as some kind of industry buffoon. But as his biography indicates, he's been around a long time, and certainly knows the computer industry inside out. That doesn't mean he's always right, but it does ensure that he writes from insight not ignorance. And let's not forget that the figure of the Fool in King Lear is the one who sees more than most, for all his jests and jibes.

Dvorak's latest effort is more of the same. It is entitled "Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source". What interests me most is not his argument, but the fact that the solution is open source. Moreover, the worst-case scenario is that Apple does nothing - in which case, open source can just sit back with Olympian detachment and watch Microsoft and Apple pull each other's hair in the closed-source playground.

Does Larry's Linux Stack Up?

The tantalising story in the FT that Oracle is ruminating upon acquiring one of the main GNU/Linux distributions - well, Novell - is bound to re-ignite speculation about Oracle's intentions and ultimate impact in this sector. An earlier rumour that Oracle was about to buy JBoss - obviously not true - led to a similar spate of comments, for example that Oracle was about to wipe out open source itself.

But as I wrote back then, it would seem that Larry Ellison really doesn't get this free software lark if he thinks he can wade in with a cheque-book and walk out with anything perdurable. Basically, the moment he tries to throw his weight around in any newly-acquired open source company, he will find that everything valuable in that company - its coders - will walk out of the door and work somewhere else (like Red Hat or IBM). So the idea he will snaffle up one of these cute little old GNU/Linuxes to complete his collection of netsuke rather misses the point.

What is really interesting about the FT story is that Mr. Ellison says "I’d like to have a complete stack." The stack refers to the complete set of software layers, starting at the bottom with the operating system, moving up through middleware and on to the applications. This shows that he may not quite understand the answer, but at least can articulate the question, which is: what does a software company do when the layers of the stack are commoditised one by one?

Things started even below the operating system, at the level of the network, when TCP/IP became the universal standard. But what many people forget is that once upon a time, there used to be three or four or more competing network standards, including Novell's IPX/SPX: it was Novell's dogged support for its protocols in the face of TCP/IP's ascendancy that nearly destroyed the company.

Similarly, not everyone today realises that once there were alternatives to the now-ubiquitous GNU/Linux operating system, including an older approach from a company called Microsoft, also destroyed by clinging too long to outdated closed-source solutions (this information sponsored by the year 2016).

What Ellison's comments indicate is that there is growing awareness that the free software approach is seeping inexorably up the stack. It will be interesting to see his response when it starts to dampen the application layer, and databases like Oracle's flagship start looking as soggy as IPX/SPX....

Update: There's a good table in this C|net article on how the competing stacks, er, stack up.

The Open Research Web

Aside from the strong moral arguments for open access - based on the fact that much of the research published in journals has been paid for by the public, who therefore have a right to see the stuff - there are also strong utilitarian grounds for making materials freely accessible.

A group at Southampton, including the irrepressible Stevan Harnad, have put together an excellent discussion of some of the amazing things that thoroughgoing open access will permit in the future.

Many of them - there are 28 in all - are positively gob-smacking, and make explicit the way in which the open access revolution will render ordinary impact factors, one of the great bugbears of academic research, obsolete by bringing in far richer metrics for measuring influence and achievement.

This is the sort of stuff that will make traditional publishers break into a cold sweat at night; but it will warm the cockles of the growing band of OA supporters because it breaks the vicious circle of "high-impact" journals being favoured by top researchers simply because they are "high-impact", not because they are the best vehicles.

Open Access Books Are Like Buses...

...you wait for ages, and then three turn up at once.

Well, two at least: I wrote recently about Willinsky's The Access Principle, and now here, hard on its heels, comes Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.

If the name Benkler is unfamiliar, you might want to glance at the suggestively-titled Coase's Penguin (yes, that penguin), which is effectively a sketch of the present book. Both, then, are about how the network changes everything, and how all the opens and the various kinds of commons that are central concerns of this blog lie at the heart of one of the most profound economic, social and political transformations seen in recent years.

But don't take my word for it, listen to what Larry Lessig has to say, with typical generosity:

This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.

Then buy/download the thing (CC licence, of course) and read it. I know I will. The fact that I haven't yet finished its 500+ pages is not just another reason not to listen to me: it's also a further hint of why eventually all books will be freely available as digital downloads online. Basically, reading on a screen and reading text placed on a physical object are two quite different experiences, and warrant two quite different business models.

"The Access Principle" Made Accessible

One of the jibes that the anti-open access lot like to lob is that many of those writing in favour of these ideas often do so in non-open access outlets. But the fact is, we don't always have a choice if we want to reach traditional audiences who aren't yet used to reading open access titles/media. Against this background, it's good to see some traditional publishers proving amenable to releasing open access versions of works dealing with open access alongside the hard-copy versions.

A case in point is The Access Principle, The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, by John Willinsky. I've just discovered (through the indispensable Open Access News) that the enlightened MIT Press has made this freely available (apart from some mild registration): kudos for that.

I've only skimmed through the first few chapters, but already it looks to be about the most important book on open access so far. This is hardly surprising given the author's work as director of the Public Knowledge Project - and the fact that he wrote an essay entitled "The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science", which sounds strangely familiar as an idea.

So now there's no excuse for anyone not to rush out and buy it/download it and read it.

End of the World Nigh: VCs Clueful on Patents

And now for some good news about patents - no really. Judging by this article on the excellent Techdirt, a few of the brighter VCs are starting to get the message about software patents. Next thing you know, even the lawyers will join in - then we'll know that the end of the world is really nigh.

Right-minded Right to Create

As you may have noticed, some of the more outrageous abuses of the patent system tend to make me go a funny colour. So I was interested to discover (via Techdirt) that there is an entire right-minded site called Right to Create offering a concentrated helping of bile directed at the manifold insanities of the patent system.

The only trouble is, having read it, I think I need to go and lie down for a while.

PageRank on a Stick

Googlejuice: everybody wants it. It's measured in that mysterious coinage of the cyber-realm known as PageRank, and everybody wants to know how much they've got. Enter Webmaster Eyes, which tells you (via Digg). And if you were wondering, Google's GoogleJuice is 10 (and this site is a middling 6).

Windows Live Academic Search Goes Live

Microsoft has rolled out the first beta of its academic search engine. It has some nice Web 2.0-y features that make it look far cooler than Google Scholar (Google, are you listening?). One of the FAQs made me smile:

What about open source repositories? Do you have content from them in your index?

Academic search has implemented the Open Architecture Initiative (OAI) protocol for indexing OAI-compliant repositories. For example, we indexed the content present in ArXiv.org for the launch. We will continue to index more repositories after the launch.

I don't know of anybody except Microsoft that calls these OAI repositories "open source": you don't think that Microsoft's hung up on something?

Another FAQ talks about something new to me: the OpenURL. This turns out to be a wonderful piece of Orwellian double-speak, since it is a way of ensuring that people only get to see the content they are "entitled" to - that is, have paid for. In other words, OpenURL is all about closing off your options.

What a Tangled Bank We Weave

If you've not come across the Tangled Bank miscellanies, take a look at the latest one, hosted on the fine Discovering Biology in a Digital World blog. As the Tangled Bank home site puts it, these collections are a "weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves," in the realm of science. And yes, I'm afraid there's something by me.

But it's still worth reading.

From Blogroll to Searchroll

I confess it: I'm a sucker for analogical thought. So taking the idea of a blogroll - even if I don't actually use the things - and coming up with a "searchroll" - a personalised list of sites across which you can carry out searches - is intrinsically appealing. This is what Rollyo has done: I know it's not exactly new, but the last time I looked there wasn't much to see. Now there is.

For example, I was rather taken with this Russian library searchroll, which somehow makes the idea nicely concrete. I can see that you might well want to search through a group of related sites, rather than wade through several million Google hits.

The only problem, of course, is that you either have to set up the searchrolls yourself, or try to find one that suits your needs. Fortunately Rollyo has done the obvious, and come up with a search engine for search rolls. From here you can enter keywords and try to piggy-back off someone else's collection (all in the spirit of sharing, of course).

I was impressed with the range of open source searchrolls that are already available. Open access searchrolls are thinner on the ground, while open content is waiting for its first example. Any offers?

Webaroo - Yawnaroo

Convincing proof that Web 2.0 is a replay of Web 1.0 comes in the form of Webaroo. As this piece from Om Malik explains, this start-up aims to offer users a compressed "best of the Web" that they can carry around on their laptops and use even when they're offline.

Sorry, this idea was invented back in 1995, when Frontier Technologies released its SuperHighway Access CyberSearch, a CD-ROM that contained a "best of the Web" based on Lycos - at the time, one of the best search engines. As I wrote in September 1995:

Not all of the Lycos base has been included: contained in the 608 Mbytes on the disc is information on around 500,000 pages. The search engine is also simplified: whereas Lycos possesses a reasonably powerful search language, the CyberSearch tool allows you to enter just a word or phrase.

Only the scale has changed....

Open Peer Review

Open access does not aim to subvert the peer review process that lies at the heart of academic publishing: it just wants to open things up a little. But you know how it is: once you start this subversive stuff, it's really hard to stop.

So what did I come across recently, but this fascinating hint of what opening up peer review might achieve (as for the how, think blogs or wikis). Maybe an idea whose time has (almost) come.

(Patently) Right

Paul Graham is a master stylist - indeed, one of the best writers on technology around. Reading his latest essay, "Are Software Patents Evil?" is like floating in linguistic cream. And that's the problem. His prose is so seductive that it is too easy to be hypnotised by his gently-rhythmic cadences, too pleasurable to be lulled into a complaisant state, until you find yourself nodding mechanically in agreement - even with ideas that are, alas, fundamentally wrong.

Take his point in this recent essay about algorithms, where he tries to argue that software patents are OK, even when they are essentially algorithms, because hardware is really only an instantiation of an algorithm.

If you allow patents on algorithms, you block anyone from using what is just a mathematical technique. If you allow patents on algorithms of any kind, then you can patent mathematics and its representations of physics (what we loosely call the Laws of Physics are in fact just algorithms for calculating reality).

But let's look at the objection he raises, that hardware is really just an algorithm made physical. Maybe they are; but the point is you have to work out how to make that algorithm physical - and that's what the patent is for, not for the algorithm itself. Note that such a patent does not block anyone else from coming up with different physical manifestations of it. They are simply stopped from copying your particular idea.

It's instructive to look at another area where patents are being hugely abused: in the field of genes. Thanks to a ruling in 1980 that DNA could be patented, there has been a flood of completely insane patent applications, some of which have been granted (mostly in the US, of course). Generally, these concern genes - DNA that codes for particular proteins. The argument is that these proteins do useful things, so the DNA that codes for them can therefore be patented.

The problem is that there is no way of coming up with an alternative to that gene: it is "the" gene for some particular biological function. So the patent on it blocks everyone using that genomic information, for whatever purpose. What should be patentable - because, let me be clear here, patents do serve a useful purpose when granted appropriately - is the particular use of the protein - not the DNA - the physical instantiation of what is effectively a genomic algorithm.

Allowing patents on a particular industrial use for a protein - not a patent on its function in nature - leaves the door open for others to find other chemicals that can do the same job for the industrial application. It also leaves the DNA as information/algorithm, outside the realm of patents.

This test of whether a patent allows alternative implementations of the underlying idea can be applied fruitfully to the equally-vexed questions of business methods. Amazon's famous "one-click" method of online making purchases is clearly total codswallop as a patent. It is a patent on an idea, and blocks everyone else from implementing that (obvious) idea.

The same can be said about an earlier patent that Oracle applied for, which apparently involved the conversion of one markup language into another. As any programmer will tell you, this is essentially trivial, in the mathematical sense that you can define a set of rules - an algorithm - and the whole drops out automatically. And if you apply the test above - does it block other implementations? - this clearly does, since if such a patent were granted, it would stop everyone else coming up with algorithms for conversions. Worse, there would be no other way to do it, since the process is simply a restatement of the problem.

I was heartened to see that a blog posting on this case by John Lambert, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property, called forth a whole series of comments that explored the ideas I've sketched out above. I urge you to read it. What's striking is that the posts - rather like this one - are lacking the polish and poise of Graham's writing, but they more than make up for it in the passion they display, and the fact that they are (patently) right.

Death to the Podcast

"Podcast" is such a cool word. It manages to be familiar, made up as it is of the odd little "pod" and suffix "-cast", as in "broadcast", and yet cheekily new. Pity, then, that it's completely the wrong term for what it describes.

These are simply downloadable mp3 files. The "pod" bit is a misnomer, because the iPod is but one way to listen to them: any mp3 player will do. And the "-cast" is wrong, too, because they are not broadcast in any sense - you just download them. And if they were broadcast across the Internet, then you'd call them streams - as in "podstream", rather than "podcast".

Given my long-standing dislike of this term - and its unthinking adoption by a mainstream press terrified of looking uncool - I was pleased to come across Jack Schofield's opinion on the subject, where he writes:

[P]odcasting's main appeal at the moment is time-shifting professionally-produced programmes. It's a variant of tape recording, and should probably be called AOD (audio on demand).

AOD: that sounds good to me, Jack.

His wise suggestion comes in piece commenting on the release of a typically-expensive ($249 for six pages) piece of market research on this sector from Forrester Research.

Many people have taken its results - the fact that only 1% of online households in the US regularly download and listen to AOD - to indicate the death of the medium. I don't agree: I think people will continue to enjoy audio on demand in many situations. For example, I regularly return to the excellent Chinesepod site, a shining example of how to use AOD well.

But even if the downloads live on, I do hope that we might see the death of the term "podcast".

Another Day, Another Open

Open content is an area that I follow quite closely. I've just finished the second of a series of articles for LWN.net that traces the growth of open content and its connections with open source. The first of these is on open access, while the most recent looks at Project Gutenberg and the birth of open content. The next will look at open content in education, including the various open courseware projects.

Here's a report from UNESCO on the area, which it has dubbed open educational resources, defined as

the creation of open source software and development tools, the creation and provision of open course content, and the development of standards and licensing tools.

I'm not quite sure we really needed a new umbrella term for this, but it's good to see the matter being discussed at high levels within the global education community.

A Nod's as Good as a Wink

As I mentioned, I have started playing with Google Analytics for this blog. It's early days yet, but already some fascinating results have dropped out - I'll be reporting on them once the trends become slightly more significant than those based on two days' data....

But one thing just popped up that I thought I'd pass on. Some of my traffic has come from Wink, which describes itself as a social search engine. More specifically:

Wink analyzes tags and submissions from Digg, Furl, Slashdot, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services, plus user-imported tags from del.icio.us, and favorites marked at Wink, and figure[s] out which pages are most relevant.

So basically Wink aims to filter standard Web search results through the grid of social software like Digg, del.icio.us etc. It's a clever idea, although the results at the moment are a little, shall we say, jejune. But I'm grateful for the tip that Google Analytics - and one of my readers - has given me. Duly noted.

UNDPAPDIPIOSN - A Name to Remember?

The UN is such a huge, amorphous organisation that it is no suprise that there are bits of it that rarely make it into the limelight. A case in point is the UN Development Programme (UNDP), "the UN's global development network, an organization advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life."

Given its task, and its doubtless limited resources, it is only natural that the UNDP has been promoting free software use around the world longer than most (I first talked to them about it in 1997), and its efforts in this sphere are becoming significant. It now has a separate arm, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Asia Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) International Open Source Network - UNDPAPDIPIOSN for short.

As a quick glance at the home page shows, there's lot of good stuff going on, with all the right buzzwords. For example, news on the Asian Commons, a press release about the UNDPAPDIPIOSN joining the ODF Alliance, which pushes for ODF adoption (and complements the OpenDocument Fellowship I mentioned yesterday), plus some free software primers.

What I like about these is that they take a truly global view of things, providing information about open source adoption around the world that is hard to come by elsewhere, particularly in a consolidated form. They deserve to be better known - as does the UNDPAPDIPIOSN itself - although probably not under that name....(IOSN seems to be the preferred abbreviation).

Microsoft's Open Source Blog

Not something you see every day: a Web site called Port 25, with the explanatory line "Communications from the Open Source Software Lab @ Microsoft". Yup, you read that right. It will be interesting to see what they do with this apparent attempt to reach out (port 25, right?) - especially if they can get rid of the Russian spam on Bill Hilf's welcoming post....

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.

ODF Petition Hits 10,000

I'm a big fan of the OpenDocument Fellowship - there's something very Tolkienian about it, and it's one of the best places to keep on top of developments in this important area.

One of its projects is a petition trying to persuade Microsoft to support the Open Document Format. This may be somewhat of a forlorn hope, but then they do say that a gentleman only supports lost causes.

If you wish to add your name to the 10,000 or so who have shown their gentlemanly/ladylike credentials in this way, you can do so here.