I've already dealt with the daft idea of open source being "acquired en masse" elsewhere. I'm just surprised that it took the great echo chamber of so-called market analysis so long before chiming in on this cracked note.
My book Digital Code of Life was partly about the battle to keep genomic and other bioinformatics information open. So it's good to see the very first public genomic database, now EMBL, spreading its wings and mutating into FELICS (Free European Life-science Information and Computational Services) with even more bioinformatics goodies freely available (thanks to a little help from the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent Office).
Books are lovely objects, but problematic in terms of their content - once they're published, you can't correct the errors easily. But here's an idea: publish beta versions of books, so that at least some of the bugs can be ironed out before they're published.
O'Reilly have taken the plunge, and kudos to them. One thing: given that the beta-testers are adding value, shouldn't they at least get the nascent titles free? (Via Linux-Watch.)
Richard Poynder offers an interesting interview with Professor Subbiah Arunachalam on open access in India, conducted with his customary thoroughness and professionalism.
What's so good about this piece is that it fleshes out all the generalities people (like me) make about how open access can be helpful for developing nations, where a huge amount of knowledge is generated, but little is let through by the traditional gatekeepers of the Western academic tradition.
This is in addition to flows in the other direction, which allow those with modest library budgets to access leading-edge research in freely-available journals like those published by the Public Library of Science.
We've had Openlaw, where anyone can contribute information to the crafting of a legal argument; now we've got Wikocracy, where anyone can edit and revise laws (via Bubblegeneration).
A truly fascinating piece by Clifford Lynch explores what might be possible once we have total open access to scholarly writings, and can apply computation to this mass of raw data in an unfettered way. As he points out:The opportunities are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form.
(Via Open Access News).
Update: Don's miss this splendid interview with Lynch: I wish I were half as articulate....
"Leaks" (yeah, right) about another new Microsoft Live service: Windows Live QnA, going, er, live soon. What's curious is that this is a version of Google Answers that is entirely open and democratic. In other words, it's a kind of cross between Wikipedia and eBay, where anybody can answer, and people rate the answers using a reputation-based scoring system. But wait: isn't Wikipedia discredited these days? Has anybody told Bill about this communistic stuff?
(And just look at all the Windows Live Betas coming through: wow, Microsoft is really moving here.)
Another milestone in the march of the distributed meme: a film financed by a Net-based group of 50,000 angel micro-investors: the Swarm. This takes it even beyond Elephant's Dream. Like it, the new film will be released under a CC licence that allows remixing (via Boing Boing).
Any fool can knock the music business for their short-sighted refusal to work with the Internet, rather than against it (heaven knows, I've done it myself). But coming up with constructive suggestions as to how they might make money without employing the digital ninja overkill of DRM is less easy. This makes any example of a singer/label who's not only found a way to treat the audience as adults, but is making money by doing so, a real find.
She's Jane Siberry, and old fogey that I am, I've never heard of her. But the who isn't as important as the what, which she calls self-determined pricing. Basically, you get to choose how much to pay for the music you buy. Here are the details:Like many, I'm restless and impatient with living in a world where people are made to feel like shoplifters rather than intelligent peoples with a good sense of balance. I want to treat people the way I'd like to be treated. 'Dumbing UP' (as opposed to 'dumbing down').
WHAT ARE SELF-DETERMINED TRANSACTIONS?
NOT donations
NOT pay-what-you-can
NOT guilt-trips
NOT tests of your integrity
ARE TRANSACTIONS
You decide what feels right to your gut. If you download for free, perhaps you'll buy an extra CD at an indie band's concert. Or if you don't go with your gut feeling, you might sleep poorly, wake up grumpy, put your shoes on backwards and fall over. Whatever. You'll know what to do.
WHAT YOU WILL FIND AT SHEEBA STORE
FOUR choices on pop-down 'buy' button
1. free (gift from Jane)
2. self-determined (pay now)
3. self-determined (pay later so you are truly educated in your decision)
4. standard (today's going rate is about .99)
STATISTICS BAR: You can see what the paying trends are.
GIFTS: You can still send mp3 gifts to friends with any payment choice.
Aside from the wonderful maturity of this approach - and the maturity that it assumes in the buyer - the other interesting thing is that the pricing mechanism is essentially open and collaborative. By showing what others are currently paying, it sets a kind of community standard for conduct. The pressure to conform to that standard comes not from the artist - and certainly not from corporate lawyers threatening to sue you, your family and your dog into kingdom come - but from the community of your peers (peers at least in terms of the music you like).
It is this that makes Sheeba Store's experiment so important, because it can be generalised to all kinds of digital goods where there are no obvious ways to set a fair price. Open, collaborative pricing is by definition fair (at least within that particular community), it is self-generating and self-regulating.
Given the fact that the tracks are selling for non-zero sums (and that some people do pay more than the average, making up for any perceived "free riders"), the system seems to be working (at least in the short term). Now if only the established music industry were mature enough to see the sense and justice of this approach, and take it for a spin themselves....
I wrote a little about the Guardian's campaign to obtain open access to Government-generated data (which we pay for), but here's an interesting alternative: generate it yourself.
This weekend, a bunch of intrepid GPS users aims to map the whole of the Isle of Wight, and then to use this information to generate their own detailed maps, which will be in released under a Creative Commons licence.
The overarching project is called OpenStreetMap, and it seems the perfect way to get public mapping data. Rather waiting for the Government graciously to give us our data back, let's take to the streets and do it ourselves: of the people, by the people, for the people.
Now, if only I had a GPS device....
A little while back, when I was musing upon e-commerce 2.0, I mentioned Chinesepod.com. Now I've gone the whole hog, interviewing the enterprising Ken Carroll, its creator, for the Guardian. I'd also recommend taking a look at Japanesepod101.com, newly-revamped, which is another fine example of e-commerce 2.0, and directly inspired by Chinesepod.
Everybody talks about "free as in beer" versus "free as in freedom". Now somebody has taken this literally: free as in Freebeer (via OpenBusiness).
Someone who has clearly had their brain frazzled by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Not opening up DRM is a win? Well, maybe for Apple, but certainly not for music lovers....
Great meditation on water as a commons - and how we need to change the way companies are allowed to "graze" this commons for profit, without taking account of larger issues.
Wandering around Technorati, I came across Novell's Open PR blog. Mere PR PR? Maybe not, since there are comments from real people - including some not-so pleasant ones, which have been left up. How's that for authenticity?
If you were wondering, then perhaps the Open Knowledge Foundation might be able to help. They have come up with an Open Knowledge Definition (they actually call it The Open Knowledge Defiition, but that seems a tad ambitious). The full half-hour argument is here.
Some wise words from the introduction:The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have 'open access' journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.
Well, that sounds familiar.
Net neutrality - the idea that the underlying technologies of the Internet should never care or even know about the details of who you are or what you are doing with the data packets it is conveying - is much in the news lately, what with outrageous demands from telecommunications companies to be allowed to charge different rates for different traffic. If you ever had any doubts that we need Net neutrality, here's someone who might convince you, since he knows a thing or two about this area.
This paper, with the title "Open Access" and its Social Context: New Colonialism in the Making? has to take the biscuit for one of the least clueful analyses of the idea of open access. With admirable restraint Peter Suber demolishes the painful misconceptions this chap seems to be labouring under.
But I prefer to direct your gaze to the following pearls of wisdom:Thus granting "open access" to information through technical devices and social removal of "access limits" leads to re-construction of such barriers within the individual. There is no alternative: in order to use his or her intellectual capacities to their best, the reader needs to move from having access to using the access. Researchers are increasingly developing strategies for not paying attention to uninteresting or currently unusable sources and may block access to the external sources that try to persuade them that something new is of interest. Thus, the socio-economic result of the "open access" to scientific knowledge may give way not to more uses of that availability but to new forms of elimination of the functional uses of the materials. Instead of not having funds to subscribe to all relevant journals the inaccessibility comes out of one's own mental processing capacity and its limitations. Here of course new technologies cannot help—and need not—since the issue at stake is not the number of articles read but new ideas generated by reading and thinking.
Or, put another way:
With open access, people are able to choose what they read, and then decide whether or not they agree with the ideas they encounter.
Shocking, positively shocking.
This is how the world ends, not with a bang - not with a clash of titans - but with a whimper, in an obscure WIPO committee. The committee in question rejoices in the moniker "U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Committee". And this is how the report on the EFF's site lays out the effects of the current draft of its work:The treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters, and potentially webcasters, broad new 50 year rights to control transmissions over the Internet, irrespective of the copyright status of the transmitted material. It also requires countries to provide legal protection for broadcaster technological protection measures.
Essentially it would be a huge win for the major content owners, a huge win for the status quo, and a huge win for IP maximalists. As this piece from Boing Boing explains, those IP maximalists are largely in the US, and the proposals in this treaty are largely driven by their agenda of locking down all forms of content, everywhere in the world, in the belief that it will increase their profits, even if it will chill all kinds of creative expression in the process.
Nothing new there, then. But what is notable is how the battle is being taken behind the scenes - not in public forums where alternative viewpoints can be aired, and the erroneous logic of the proposal refuted - but in the dark, rank, chummy world of deadly-tedious drafting committees, where every trick in the book can be used to out-manoeuvre those fighting to defend creative freedom.
The treaty in question is a case in point. As the EFF report on the moves explains:Webcasting is now back in the treaty, after spending last year in a separate "working paper" because the majority of countries opposed its inclusion in 2004. Despite many counties' opposition again in 2005, it’s been included in the treaty as a non-mandatory Appendix. Countries that sign the treaty have the option – at any time -- to grant webcasters the same exclusive rights given to broadcasters and cablecasters by depositing a notice with WIPO.
At the same time, some of the key proposals to balance the impact of the new treaty have been removed from the new draft treaty text (the Draft Basic Proposal) and relegated to a new separate "Working Paper". For instance, the alternative that the treaty not include the contentious Technological Protection Measure obligations is not in the Draft Basic Proposal, but has been sidelined to the Draft Working Paper.
Unfortunately, it is hard to see who is going to stop this. As more and more battles are won at the national level, so the fight over content moves up the stack, to supra-national bodies that wield immense power, are subject to little or no oversight, and which are largely aligned with the interests of the already-rich and the already-powerful against anybody who would like to share a little of that money and power.
Update 1: The EFF reports that webcasting is now out of the main treaty again, but that the threat in the longer-term remains.
Update 2: Here's a good report by James Love on where things now stand (via On the Commons).
Given the convergence of thinking about the digital and analogue commons that is taking place, the news that EarthTrends is releasing its online collection of information regarding environmental, social, and economic trends under a Creative Commons licence is welcome.
The term "open content" is applied almost universally to materials that are freely available to varying degrees. Its origins derive directly from the term "open source". But what about the correlate of "free software"? Enter free content, which some enterprising souls have decided to promote. Among them is Erik Möller, the bloke behind both Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons, so he certainly has the right credentials.
The thought-provoking Against Monopoly blog makes an interesting contrast: copyright bad, trademark good. Not quite sure where a copyright-less world would leaves the GNU GPL, though, which depends on copyright to work.
McNealy leaving Sun is certainly the end of an era. But the big question is: what follows?
As far as Jonathan Schwartz is concerned, too much is being made (a) of his ponytail, and (b) of his blog. Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking is this panegyric:There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And ... I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.
No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.
No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.
Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who did all these things, and did them entirely out of altruism, but supposedly about McNealy, who did nothing on the same scale, and did it for the dosh. If this is the quality of analysis we can expect from the new head of Sun, it's probably time to find some comfortable chairs, order a dry sherry, and to enjoy the imminent sunset.
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