Blogging with Style

Well, more blogging in the style of the Telegraph: this is their blogging guide, which they've kindly made available. And well worth reading too: you can't have too many of these, since they represent a kind of group wisdom as help and hints get passed around. (via Open (finds, minds conversations).)

Vote, Vote, Vote for the EU Parliament

After voting out software patents, the EU Parliament has proved its worth again. It asked the European Court of Justice to block an agreement between the European Commission, EU governments and the US whereby European airline passenger data is meekly handed over to the US authorities, and the wise old court has agreed.

This could get very interesting.

The Decline and Fall of Microsoft

This sounds like a trivial story: morale among workers at Microsoft is low. So what? you may ask.

But this is how the company will be defeated.

Not by the continuing rise of open source rising, not because local and national governments refuse to buy its over-priced, under-performing products. Simply because, like all empires, it will sink down under the weight of its own corporate infrastructure into a kind of vast, irresistible lethargy, unable to summon up the power to fight these and other threats, unable to motivate its workers to produce anything of any real value.

Microsoft will never be destroyed; it will just fade away.

GPL'ed Java

I see that Jonathan is still trying to impress me with tantalising hints that he may take Java open source using the GPL.

Wiki + Google Maps = WikiMapia

As I've said before, every good mashup needs a mesh, and you can't beat a map as a mesh. So here we have the obvious next step: a wiki based on the mesh of Google Maps - WikiMapia, which describes itself modestly as "a project to describe the whole planet Earth". Not much there at the moment, so you know what you have to do.... (Via C|net).

The Bloggable is Political

An interesting story in the New York Times that hints at how gobbets of the blogosphere may be starting to emerge blinking into the strange world of meatspace, with potentially important political ramifications.

BloodSpell - For Openness' Sake

Another film released under a Creative Commons licence - but this one with a twist. It's made using the Machinima framework - a kind of virtual world production. It's dead clunky now (think old videogames), but it's not hard to see where this is going: completely realistic virtual worlds that unfold according to scripts with actors capable of independent action, all filmed with free camerawork. Hollywood won't know what hits it.

All it needs now is a fully open-source platform. Unless one already exists - my ignorance of this fascinating world is such that it might well do, but I couldn't find one. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Now It's Larry's Turn

I'm not a great fan of market research companies, but these studies certainly sound eminently sensible to me. No wonder Larry's desperately trying to crash the open source party.

Microsoft's War on Two Fronts

Not content with making itself look ridiculous trying to find ways in which GNU/Linux is worse than Windows, Microsoft has now decided it wants to look doubly silly by calling the OpenDocument Format "slow" compared to its own office format. Read the article for why this is an extremely desperate thing to do.

SuperOyster, Cybertout, Queue-Trolls

Well, perhaps it was inevitable, given the online Klondike rush to devise "monetizations" of god knows what: someone has come up with a way for people to buy and sell positions in a queue.

But aside from giving the rich even more ways to push ahead of the little people, the inevitable result of this approach will be thousands of cybertouts joining queues purely with a view to selling their positions to those with more money than morals.

If you want to see a practical example of the commons destruction this wanton "monetization" causes, just take a peep at the domain name system. This used to be about people buying domains to use; now it's mostly about guessing which names others will want, buying them first, then trying to flog them for exorbitant prices - thereby adding precisely nothing to the ecosystem.

A bit like patent trolls, really. Now, there's a coincidence. (Via TechCrunch.)patent trolls, queuing,

How to Save the Commons: Compute

There aren't many commons bigger than the atmosphere, nor one whose existence in something near its present state is so critical to our own survival. But in the face of the indisputable scientific consensus that global warming is taking place, it is hard to know what to do.

Well, short of rugby-tackling your elected representatives to the ground and refusing to let go until they do something about the climate crisis, you might at least join this project. It's pretty standard distributed computing stuff: your PC (Windows only, alas) does calculations in the background during idle time, and contributes its bit(s) to the greater whole - in this case making more accurate predictions about climate change.

It hardly requires much commitment from you, just a quick download, plus some electricity (pity that the latter will make the global warming worse). In fact, it's worth taking part just to get the ultra-cool screen-saver, which shows your model - your earth - and its climate, evolving before your very eyes.

Are O'Reilly Still Really the Good Guys?

Apparently not.

Update 1: See Jack Schofield's wise words on the matter.

Update 2: And this is Tim O'Reilly's response. Dunno: seems a bit hectoring, to me.

Welcome to the 20th Century

Region coding on DVDs is an old throwback to when the world was disconnected, and different parts of it could go their merry ways. But since the arrival of that curious thing called the Internet, we all live in the same county, which makes country codes pointless.

Alas, somebody forgot to tell the DVD Forum, who look likely to push through the same stupid approach for HD DVDs. Good job nobody is buying them. (Via the Reg.)

Google Does Picasa for GNU/Linux...Almost

In the light of an earlier post wondering whose side Google was really on, the news that it has come out with a GNU/Linux version of its Picasa image management tool is interesting - particularly because of the way it has chosen to do it.

Rather than release a completely re-written version for the GNU/Linux platform, it has chosen to "cheat" by using WINE, which lets it employ the Windows code that is then mediated by WINE. So while it's good to have Picasa for GNU/Linux, it would have been nicer to see Google going all the way, rather than cobbling together this makeshift version.

However, to be fair, Google's decision has resulted in some patches for WINE, which may well help other porting projects. Apparently, a GNU/Linux version of Google Earth is also coming, but this won't be using WINE. (via Ars Technica.)

A Quantum Mechanic Writes

How could anyone fail to love a project called Dirac? It's named after one of the most modest of quantum mechanics' pioneers. He once said that he was fortunate enough to have found himself amidst the Golden Age of quantum mechanics, when even second-rate minds could make first-rate discoveries.

If you're uncertain what this all means in practice, try this:
Dirac is a video codec that provides general-purpose video compression and decompression tools comparable with state-of-the-art systems.

All distributed under an open source licence by those kind people at the BBC.

A Tiny Victory?

This is all deeply abstruse stuff, but the bottom line is that there seems to be a glimmer sanity in the European Commission's attitude to the European patent system, in the clash between the competencies of the European Union and the European Patent Office (which have little to do with each other), and even with regard to the patentability of software. Or are we being too optimistic?

Open Filmmaking

After collaborative books, here comes collaborative filmmaking. A film in 28 parts, made by 28 different groups, the whole released under a CC licence. (Via eHub)

Creators' Rights in the Digital World

As something of a "IP minimalist", I obviously need to think about how creators are rewarded for their work in a world with little or no copyright. This post offers some possible answers, and links to an interesting document (available as both an HTML or PDF file).

The latter is by no means perfect - some of its facts are wrong - but it provides an excellent recent history of interwined worlds of open content and copyright, as well as plenty of links to important further materials. (Via LXer.com).

The Future of the Book?

The site Institute for the Future of the Book is certainly pushing the concept of the book hard in an effort to explore the idea and related issues. For example there are blog posts about a vaguely open content book, real collaborative fiction, even some thoughts on Linux kernel development. But the really interesting stuff is to be found in the site's projects.

There's Sophie, an open source, multimedia, interactive authoring tool (not out yet), and there's The Gates, which attempts something I've also fantasised about: gathering together and somehow amalgamating thousands of images of a particular place and event to create a kind of vast, multi-dimensional tapestry of people's memories.

It's based on Flickr (of course), but clearly requires something more: a new kind of tool for building such a open, collaborative work. The ideas for this are sketched out here. Fascinating.

Pin the eTail on the eDonkey

I thought that the Germans were tech-savvy, and then they go and do this. Still, people must be relieved that there is so little crime in Germany that their police have nothing better to do than acting as the heavy mob of the "entertainment" industry.

Strange, though, that eMusic is doing so well despite that fact that its music is completely defenceless in the face of cutlass-wielding piratical types, while the German recording industry, which spends most of its time trying to protect its monetized corporate intellectual property assets - sorry, music - fares so badly. Now, why could that be? (Via TechDirt.)

Eee by Gum: Now That's What I Call (e)Music

This Ars Technica article makes a good point: that Apple's refusal to license its DRM system means that only non-DRM'd music can be sold by anyone other than Apple to iPod users, now the largest slice of the digital music sector. And that's just what eMusic has done with great success: it claims to be the world's number retailer of downloadable music.

What particularly interested me is that among its million tracks are many from the Naxos catalogue. Naxos is the biggest-selling classical label, and by no means just cheap and cheerful, even if it started out that way. It now has an enviably-wide collection that includes many rare and obscure masterpieces, with more being added all the time.

No DRM, reasonable prices (25 US cents or under per track) and an increasingly good classical catalogue: bravo, eMusic.

More "Piracy" Poppycock

The Business Software Alliance has published another of its misleading propaganda efforts directed against the threat of so-called "piracy". It claims that a quarter of the software used in the UK is pirated. Now, I'd be willing to bet that this "research" doesn't take into account the growing use of free software, which can't be pirated, by definition. There are two ways in which this would affect the the 25% figure.

One, is that including free software reduces proportionately the share of closed software, which therefore makes the level of "piracy" go down too. Similarly, if any open source software is included in the overall total, so-called "pirate" copies may well include copies of free software that have not been bought - which are therefore perfectly legal, and should not be included in the "piracy" figure.

Aside from these methodological issues, there is an even bigger problem with the BSA document. From the BBC report on the story:

The impact of pirated software was felt very widely, she said, as it took cash out of the UK's technology culture and stunted money available for innovation.

"This is a serious issue. It's not affecting just businesses but everyone down the line," she said.

She added that reducing piracy significantly would mean a boost for the UK economy.

This is of course, complete poppycock and balderdash. Any extra money obtained would go straight into Bill Gates' pockets, and would do very little for the local economy. Indeed, cynics might argue that "piracy" is actually good for the UK's economy, since it reduce imports and hence outflows of cash. Personally, though, I'd just like more people to use free software so that the entire pseudo-issue of "piracy" disappeared.

Microsoft is Virtually into Virtualisation

This story about Microsoft moving deeper into virtualisation is interesting for a number of reasons. First, because it reveals one of the worst names for a product that I've heard in a long time:

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager

If you think about all these grey terms too long, your brain begins to deliquesce.

It also contains a good summary of the current state of play in virtualisation:

Virtualization, which today generally refers to the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously to make a computer more efficient, is a hot area and one in which Microsoft lags rivals. Even as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices add virtualization hardware support to make the technology mainstream, market leader VMware is exerting price pressure on Microsoft while the Xen project is giving rival Linux a major lead over Windows.

But one thing it doesn't explore - and which will be interesting to follow - is that fact that there are some very interesting licensing issues here. With open source, there's no problem: you want to bung 83 virtual copies of GNU/Linux on a box, you go ahead. But if you do that with Windows, do you have to pay for one copy, or 83...?

SOA, Web 2.0, SaaS, and...?

There's a fine flurry of activity in the blogosphere at the moment, dissecting the relationship - and occasional antagonism - between two great buzzphrases: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0.

Both draw on the older SaaS idea - that software is provided as a service across the network, with the twist that the software services are now merely components of a larger, composite application - a mashup of sorts.

But what seems to be overlooked by many is that all these ideas were first explored by free software. Or rather open source, since it was Linus who really refined them: Stallman may have come up with the idea of free software, but the defining development methodology evolved in Linus' Helsinki bedroom.

Indeed, it was the isolation of that bedroom, where the Internet was the only connection to the growing band of hackers that rallied around the Linux kernel, that helped drive that evolution.

Linus had to make it as easy as possible for others to join in: this led to a highly modular structure, which allows coders to work on just those areas that interested them. It also makes the code better, because the modules are simplified, and the interfaces between them are well defined.

It allows people to work in parallel, both in terms of different modules, and even on the same module. In the latter case, a kind of Darwinian selection is employed to choose among the various solutions. Moreover, the Net-based open source development structure is flat, almost without hierarchies - archetypal social software à la Web 2.0.

Blogs as...Information

Now here's a novel thought: blogs, not so much as inchoate, self-indulgent, solipsistic witterings of the socially disenfranchised, but rather, as sources of information.... (Via Open Access News.)