Linus Speaks

Linus rarely gives interviews (I hit very lucky some ten years ago). So this one, on CNN, is something of a rarity. Nothing new, but it's not bad as an intro to the man and his methods. (Via LXer.)

More Ineffable Microsoft FUD

It's always fun to track Microsoft's latest contortions when it comes to open source. I've described its past efforts elsewhere, and here's the latest:

Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model.

Rather below par, I'd say: Microsoft reliable, dependable? As in reliably bug-ridden and dependably vulnerable to viruses?

They Call It Life, We Call It Lies

There's an interesting trend in the naming of institutes these days.

We have things like the Institute for Software Choice, "a global initiative promoting neutral government procurement, standards and public R&D policies for software!" Strange that this organisation didn't exist and push for choice when Microsoft utterly dominated government procurement, and really strange that the Institute's pronouncements all implicitly seem to be calling for more Microsoft products, and less of that horrible open stuff.

Because, you know, when something is truly open, you have no choice, because you could choose anything, which is clearly impossible, since you must choose something, so the whole thing's a contradiction anyway. Whereas with Microsoft's closed software, you are guaranteed to have just one, easy choice: Microsoft. So that's much better.

And then we have the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology". Well, you can probably guess how they are going to advance ecological liberty: that's right, by promoting the wonders of carbon dioxide.

You see, as this charming, down-to-earth video from the CEI indicates, all this global warming stuff is pure alarmism. The video proves this by showing two reports that global warming is threatening our planet, and then negating them with two others that report ice in the Antarctic and Greenland is thickening, not thinning. So this proves this idea that greenhouse gas is causing global warming is just nonsense.

Except for the tiresome, inconvenient fact that

the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas" concentrations.

This is the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme.

But maybe this is just part of the two for, two against situation that the video showed us: perhaps there are other equally impressive reports that say the opposite. Well, no: all the papers on climate change that could be found in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 were analysed for their views on the role of greenhouse gases on global warming. The result was clear:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

But the video urges us to ignore all this complicated scientific stuff anyway, and just to go with our hearts; as it puts it, so poetically:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

What a pity, then, that logging companies are cutting down so many of the trees and rooting up the plants: but I suppose that's all part of the economic liberty that the CEI espouses.

Update 1: A little clarifying background on the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Update 2: Larry Lessig on something related that looks pretty important.

What Do You Have to Hide?

Trust one of my digital heroes - Bruce Schneier - to provide a definitive rebuttal to the tired cliché trotted out by all those who would put us under surveillance: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Basically, it comes down to the fact that

Privacy is ... a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Read the piece for Schneier's paean to the "eternal value of privacy", as he puts it.

Open Source Management

Yes, really. Here's an excerpt:

It is open source software and its social media descendants such as wikis and blogs that are making some businesses ready to consider openness. These tools are a great start, but it's the way you use them that matters. If employers want to encourage a culture of honesty and caring in their work environment, the most important thing for employers to do is to begin with themselves.

Reasonable, no?

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest: Doing Down the Net

I've not read the article (which is hidden behind a paywall), but judging by this choice quotation

video will become the dominant way people experience the Internet over the next five years

we seem to have a prime example of either (a) somebody who really doesn't get it or (b) somebody with a vested interest who hopes that this dangerous new-fangled Net thing that risks making people do rash things like thinking and deciding for themselves will just settle down to the nice, safe, dumb TV whose effects we have come to know and love.

Openness vs. Privacy

There's an interesting tension between openness and privacy: openness is good except when it might infringe on justifiable privacy. This makes matters of privacy, and hence encryption, a kind of obverse to openness. So legislation like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is something that I've followed even before it was introduced in 2000.

I hadn't realised that part of that Act - that deals with disclosure of encryption keys - was not yet in force. As this news item explains, the UK Government is threatening to make this happen, but, as usual, without really thinking it through.

The justification - of course - is the tired old one of terrorism (anybody notice how this has become a kind of continuous justification for everything these days? - You don't think people have been reading 1984 for ideas or anything?). The "argument" is that the new powers are needed to "force" those evil terrorists to hand over the keys so that PC Plod can read all that incriminating evidence, and they can do their well-deserved porridge.

So, let's consider the various possibilities.

Either these terrorists, who tend to show scant regard for human life, let alone human laws, are suddenly going to become law-abiding, and say: "it's a fair cop, but society is to blame. Here are my encryption keys," and get sent down for the 10, 20, or 30 years they would cop for conspiring to carry out acts of terrorism blah-blah-blah. Or might they possibly just say "I've lost the keys", and get sent down for a couple of years instead?

Which do you think they'll choose?

Now tell me again why we need this legislation, since the only people it can possibly affect are law-abiding citizens like you and me, not law-defying terrorists?

Update 1: Slightly off-topic, but quite.

Update 2: More stupid UK legislation that will weaken, not strengthen people's security.

And the First Shall Be Last

It is done: the last unsequenced human chromosome - which happens to be the first in terms of size and hence numbering - has finally been "completed" (to 99.4%). Even more impressive, you can actually read the full Nature report on the subject. The digital code of the human genome, of course, has always been freely available (well, since 1996).

OK, so we've got the source code of us: all we have to do is understand it. Indications are, there will be quite a few surprises.

Digital Hoplites

I'm a great believer in the idea that one day everything - but everything - will be available online in a digital form. For content that is being created now, the main obstacles are legal, not logistical. But what about all that, you know, analogue stuff out there?

This fascinating Business Week article provides the answer, granting us a glimpse of the content grunts who are doing the digital dirty work, which most us - myself included - too easily take for granted as we wheel around the wonderful Web. (Via TechDirt.)

Gutenberg on Your Mobile

Here are 5000 free Gutenberg texts converted into a format suitable for reading on your a mobile. (Via The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter.)

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.

Boingo Goes Open Source

Wow.

Here's Boingo, which

provides software technology and roaming services that help bring the wireless Internet to the masses. The company has assembled a large and rapidly growing roaming system with tens of thousands of hot spot locations under contract around the world. Boingo also invented the world's most powerful software for discovering and connecting to hot spots and 3G wireless networks.

And here's Boingo going open source:

Boingo Wireless today announced the Boingo Embedded Wi-Fi Toolkit, an open source software package that enables developers to integrate Wi-Fi connection management to any Wi-Fi hot spot – including the more than 45,000 public hot spots that are part of the Boingo Roaming System – into small form factor devices such as dual-mode phones, VoIP handsets, mobile gaming consoles and other portable devices.

There's a great analysis at Wi-Fi Networking News on what this all means:

This open-source effort for detection and connection coupled with Devicescape’s similarly focused open-source release of its Wi-Fi authentication and encryption package could produce enormously better hotspot support in completely open projects with no connection to for-fee hotspots and in commercial projects that currently lack the finesse, exhaustiveness, or ease of either Boingo or Devicescape’s packages.

What's happening is that all the pieces are starting to fall into place for true, open wireless connectivity, as the open mantra takes over yet another conceptual domain. But more of that anon....

For now, let's just say "wow".

Micropayments? - Just Ask Millicent

Here's an interesting idea for academic publishing: micropayments as an alternative to standard subscriptions or open access. There's just one problem: micropayments have persistently failed to take off. Just look at what the W3C page on the subject says:

W3C has closed its Ecommerce and Micropayment Activity

and I don't think it was because of overwork.

Or take Digital's Millicent. I wrote about this in April 1997, when it looked highly promising. Afterwards, nothing happened, despite its evident cleverness. Today, the Millicent site is still listed on the W3C micropayments page, but so far has steadfastly refused to answer my insistent calls....

Burnished Sun Kisses Pullulating Earth

There are currently two main GNU/Linux distributions for business: Red Hat and SuSE. So it is perhaps no surprise that Sun, which badly needs to start pushing the free operating system if it wants to play in world of open source enterprise stacks, should choose something else entirely - Ubuntu, to be precise.

This makes a lot of sense: in doing so, it guarantees that it will be the senior partner in any enterprise developments, and ensures that it is not drawn into the orbits of IBM (with Red Hat) or Novell (with SuSE).

It also has bags of potential in terms of branding. Ubuntu is famous for its "I am what I am because of who we all are", as well as its tasteful mud-brown colour scheme. Now, imagine an enormous, burnished sun rising majestically over the rich, dark pullulating earth....

Update 1: Interesting interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the enterprise-level Ubuntu.

Update 2: Further confirmation of the alliance: Ubuntu running on Sun's Niagara servers.

P2P Pence

A clever idea: using P2P networks to connect borrowers and lenders, spreading the costs and risks across a distributed, people-based banking pool. What's interesting, of course, is that if this ever took off it would reduce the power of established banks - and the financial system based on them - considerably. There are, though, clearly lots of risks and uncertainties in the approach which may stifle its growth.

Two companies are mentioned in the article: Zopa, which is British, and Prosper, which is American. (Via Slashdot.)

Distant Thunder - from Space

Well, it was bound to happen:

The recording industry sued XM Satellite Radio on Tuesday over its new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music for a monthly fee, sending to the courts a roiling dispute over how consumers can legally record songs using next-generation radio services.

Time and again, a new technology that allows users to do something novel with content gets attacked by the self-appointed guardians of the sacred copyright flame - and the users' desires and rights can take a running jump. And time and again, it turns out that the new way of transmitting, making or storing copies generates more revenue, not less: think cable television, video cassettes and - soon - digital downloads of music. I'm sure satellite radio will be the same.

If only there were somebody with half a neuron in the content industries that could learn a little from history, and help forge the future, instead of needlessly fighting it all the time. (Via IP Democracy.)

Update: It appears that those behind the new lawsuit, the RIAA, specifically promised never to do this. (Via Techdirt.)

And Now - Open Telecoms

I'm not quite sure what all this means, but it sounds interesting - and has the magic "O"-word.... The details seem to suggest we're talking an open source platform for the telecoms industry - not end-users. More about OpenClovis, the company behind it all, here.

Bird 'Flu vs. Open Source, Open Data

IBM pushes all the right buttons in this announcement of an open source, open data project to predict and help stem the spread of infectious diseases - like bird 'flu.

Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies, elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community, that are designed to help share information on disease outbreaks electronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread.

And

Ultimately, those plans could include development and distribution of more effective and timely vaccines as IBM taps into knowledge gained through a planned collaborative initiative known as "Project Checkmate," in which IBM and The Scripps Research Institute propose to conduct advanced biological research on influenza viruses. The collaboration is designed to predict the way viruses will mutate over time using advanced predictive techniques running on high performance computing systems, such as IBM's BlueGene supercomputer, allowing effective vaccines to be developed by drug-makers, drawing on the immunology and chemistry expertise at Scripps.

Blue Gene runs GNU/Linux in part, so maybe open source will really save the world. (Via Boing Boing.)

Royal Society of Twits

So, the Royal Society has spent three years putting together a study into the "best practice in communicating the results of new scientific research to the public," and come up with 24 pages of patronising, anachronistic codswallop.

At a time when the prospect of making a large chunk of all human knowledge freely available online is at least feasible (even if there are massive forces of reaction ranged against it - but then I do like a challenge), their Royal Socships can think of nothing better than fretting over whether scientific research is the kind of stuff 'you would wish your wife or servants to read'. As if there were any choice in the matter in the age of the Internet.

The result of those three years of deep cogitation boils down to deciding, well, we'll just keep all this tricky science stuff to ourselves, eh?, and maybe feed a few crumbs to those press johnnies from time to time to keep the public quiet. After all, just because the hoi polloi paid for most of it, doesn't give them any right to see the damn results, oh no. Now, do pass the port - clockwise, mind.

The Joy of Open Source

It's well known that lots of big companies are using open source; but do they really get all this communal effort, contributing back to the pool stuff? Not according to this interesting report, which finds that most of the heavy coding is still done by the passionate solo programmers.

I can't say I'm surprised: as I found when I interviewed most of the top open source hackers for Rebel Code, at the heart of what they do is joy - no other word for it. And joy is not something you bang your shin against much in mega-corporations.

Stumbling after Stumbling upon StumblingUpon

A few months ago I, ahem, stumbled upon StumbleUpon, which I learn has just joined the growing dotcom 2.0 feeding frenzy with some six-figure angel funding.

The idea behind StumbleUpon is simple: you rate pages that other "stumblers" have found and recommended. This feeds back into the pages that are fed to you, as do other pages that you've stumbled upon independently, and rated. All standard social software stuff, with a hint of Google's PageRank thrown in for good measure.

It's a great displacement activity, and when I first stumbled upon it I spent some time wandering around other people's stumbles. Some were genuinely interesting, but as time went on, despite all my approving and disapproving, there weren't proportionately more sites that interested me, just a constant succession of occasional pages that on their own would have been mildly amusing. Ultimately it seemed that there was no pattern in the carpet, just more and more stuff - a kind of drip-feed Digg.com.

Maybe the novelty of stumbling wore off, but I fear it is something deeper: that it's not a very efficient way to find matter that is really of interest - as opposed to vaguely entertaining. For that, the usual news channels - and a judicious selection of hard-working blogs (like paidContent, whose posting told me about StumbleUpon's company of angels) - seems a far more reliably productive way to gather information and sites. To say nothing of Google's PageRank, or even Digg.com - which you can at least skim-read very fast.

So who's stumbling here: me or the stumblers?

Is the GNU GPL in Thrall to Copyright?

A fascinating commentary from a lawyer on an issue I raised in passing a little while back: whether the GNU GPL, which depends on copyright law for its enforcement, is therefore in thrall to "IP"/the intellectual monopolies that copyright implies?

Perhaps these nice people could help us out on this conundrum?

Is the Tide Turning for OpenDocument Format?

Hm, what's this: an analyst starting to say downright nice things about ODF? From the article by Ingrid Marson:

There is a 70 percent probability that ISO will not approve multiple XML document formats [i.e., Microsoft's rival to ODF], according to a research note published by Gartner last week. It also predicted, with the same probability, that "by 2010, ODF (OpenDocument Format) document exchange will be required by 50 percent of government and 20 percent of commercial organizations."

Cynical old dog that I am, these probabilities look a little rosy to me. Nonetheless, what is astonishing is not the numbers themselves, but that Gartner - never one to stick its neck out on open source - made the prediction. Maybe the tide is turning?

Update 1: Hardly a surprise to learn that IBM will be supporting ODF in Lotus Notes, but nonetheless welcome news, since it can only add to the momentum building behind the new standard.

Update 2: The Gartner document can be found here.

Update 3: And now KDE has joined the ODF Alliance.

Will Java Ever Explode?

Some fifteen years ago I found myself in a café near the top of Merapi, just outside Yogyakarta in central Java. As now, this was at a time of considerable seismic activity there, with lava flows in some places. It was a very strange experience, because I had the feeling that, at any moment, the whole thing might lift into the air.

You could say the same about Java - not the island, but the language. For years it has seemed on the brink of erupting in spectacular pyrotechnics, but it always falls back, to smoulder some more.

The obvious way of adding some deep, magmatic oomph to the Java market is to release the code as open source. Once again, people are whispering about this, making Java something of a litmus test for Sun's new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz: will he, won't he? Is he, isn't he?

At least, to his credit, Schwartz has kept the blogging faith....

Update: C|Net says "Sun promises to open-source Java": me, I'd like to see the details before I throw my hat in the air....

UK Copyright Laws "Absurd"

Nope, not what I say (well, I do actually), but what the terribly grown-up and sensible National Consumer Council says. But wait, there's more:

Whether for films, literary or musical works, sound recordings or broadcasts, the length of all copyright terms should be reduced to fit more closely the time period over which most financial returns are normally made. The current campaign by the music industry to extend copyright terms for sound recordings beyond 50 years has no justification. Evidence shows that music companies generally make returns on material in a matter of years not decades. Current terms already provide excessive protection of intellectual property rights at a cost to consumers.

The full NCC submission to the Gowers Review can be found here; it's clearly written and well worth a look.

What's interesting is the pressure that is now building up on the Gowers Review to do something sensible about UK copyright. First the British music industry, and now the consumer council: who will be next? (Via paidContent.org.)