...because there are far worse problems that it is sidelining, and that are largely driving it in the first place. That's what this well-argued report explains in some detail. But it goes further, offering realistic ways forward too.
Imagine being able to change your PC into a dedicated music machine, or into a tool for investigating networks. Imagine being able to swap between quite different sets of installed applications. Imagine being able to choose between hundreds of different systems - without installing a single file.
Welcome to the world of live GNU/Linux CDs.
I've always thought the ability to plug a CD into a PC, and then boot it up into a complete, ready-installed system one of the biggest boons of GNU/Linux and open source. After, you just can't do this with Windows (not legally, anyway). But the whole point of open source is mix and match, and this has led to an extraordinary wealth of live CDs - with more coming through all the time.
I had intended to write a series of articles on this (I've already done a short one for the Guardian), but I see that someone has already beaten me to it on LWN.net (disclosure: I write for them too). It's a four-parter, and looks well-worth reading.
Hmm, there's clearly something blowing around the blogosphere at the moment. First Scoble leaves Microsoft, and now Om Malik of GigaOM fame is leaving Business 2.0 to strike out on his own. Who's next?
The UK Patent Office is conducting a consultation into its proposals on supporting innovation in the UK. The purpose of the consultation is as follows:We want to ensure that our strategy for supporting innovation, particularly the programme of activities we have identified, is appropriately focused to make the most effective and efficient use of the Office's expertise and resources. We are also keen that our strategy complements rather than duplicates or cuts across innovation support activities being carried out by others. Above all we want to ensure that the strategy will deliver maximum benefits to UK business. This consultation is intended to give all interested parties the opportunity to help fashion the strategy so that it achieves these objectives.
Apparently, "[e]veryone is welcome to comment on the strategy", and you have until 21 August to do so. Start sharpening those virtual pencils.... (Via Digital Rights Network.)
I am getting seriously interested in enterprise open source currently (sad, I know), and it is extraordinary the efflorescence of software in this area. I think that it is quite realistic to look forward to some time in the not-too-distant future when open source will be able to meet all the needs of even the largest enterprise.
If there's one crucial area where open source is weak, it is in identity management. Whatever application you are deploying, you have got to be able to control access, and this is partly a matter of managing identity. It is an area where Microsoft is very strong: replacing Active Directory is probably one of the thorniest problems for anyone contemplating a move to an open source platform.
So it's good to see that Novell is sponsoring a project called Bandit, which seems to be addressing this issue. Interestingly, it fits in with Higgins, which I wrote about a little while ago. Clearly, there's lots of work to do if Active Directory is to be matched, but a least there may now be a framework for doing it.
Yesterday, I was making a presentation about open source. It was to a team of IT professionals, from the CIO down. They were a very successful team at a very successful company. This meant that they knew technology, and they knew their jobs. And yet my talk about the mad, mad, world of open source left them quite non-plussed - and I don't think it was the fault of my presentation skills.
Basically, they had not come into contact with full-force open source, and the experience clearly proved rather shocking. All this services-based stuff was so utterly alien to the professional world they had so successfully negotiated all these years, that it rather took them aback.
That was interesting, because it showed just how easy it is for pundits like me to become isolated from that world: yes, there are people for whom open source is still strange and alien.
But the other even more interesting thing is that, being intelligent, this group of IT professionals were able to grasp the basic ideas and appreciate that it might be worth considering. After all, the Internet has already changed the rules once, so maybe this open source stuff would do it again (not least because it is really the same revolution, but manifest in a different way).
This experience gives me hope that the open source message will eventually change people's way of looking at the world - and make something happen, as it did yesterday, incrementally but ineluctably.
It was bound to happen: Digg is branching out into non-nerddom. This will be an interesting test of whether all the trendy social software/Web 2.0 ideas we know and love are really relevant to "ordinary" people.
I don't normally write about personnel moves, but the news that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to join the start-up Podtech.net is certainly a blogosphere event of the first order.
Scoble has been the acceptable face of Microsoft. More: he seems to have helped change the company to the extent that it is Microsoft, rather than Google, say, that really gets this blogging stuff (come on Google, wake up at the back). His departure raises a big question: how will Microsoft fare without him? Has he successfully planted the blog culture there, or are its roots shallow?
As for Scoble, personally I think he's bonkers moving from a company that presumably would have done anything to keep him. But then I reckon all this video podcasting lark is a flash in the pan; for me, this is just Flash write large - a terribly misguided attempt to turn the Internet into television.
But I could be wrong.
As you would expect, Richard Stallman has some wise words on "intellectual property" and the trap that these words represent. He also puts things in a useful historical context:
What the [U.S.] Constitution says is that copyright law and patent law are optional. They need not exist. It says that if they do exist, their purpose is to provide a public benefit -- to promote progress by providing artificial incentives.
They are not rights that their holders are entitled to; they are artificial privileges that we might, or might not, want to hand out to encourage people to do what we find useful.
It's a wise policy. Too bad Congress -- which has to carry it out on our behalf -- takes its orders from Hollywood and Microsoft instead of from us.
Lots of people are thinking about moving to OpenOffice.org. Some people have done it. And now one of them is blogging about it. (Via OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas.)
Doc Searls has a long - very long - ramble around the idea of the commons, especially the Internet commons. I didn't quite emerge with any clear idea of what he was getting at - other than the thought expressed in the first sentence:Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? Or at least not a complete one?
I'd say that the Internet has lots of them - open source, open access, open genomics etc. - but I think he's using commons in a different way, one that is much more rooted in the original idea, as in Clapham Common. I also got the impression, that this was very much a To Be Continued.... so I look forward to more rambles in the future.
Middleware: not really the most engaging of subjects, perhaps. But what amounts to the enterprise software glue that holds together everything else is, believe me, hot. Or if you don't believe me, believe Red Hat, which paid $420 million for the middleware company JBoss recently.
What's remarkable is that JBoss is open source; what's even more remarkable, is that it's not alone in this respect. Other open source middleware efforts include Geronimo, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, JOnAS, Enhydra and now WSO2.
WSO2 is particularly interesting (if you are into enterprise glue), because it takes a very different approach, based on two buzzconcepts: Web services and Service Oreinted Architecture (SOA):Web services is the simple new approach for building Web-based applications and integrating systems across different platforms. Web services standards start simple but grow to provide security, reliable exchange and transaction support.
Based on Service Oriented Architecture the new platform helps build applications that are simpler, more flexible, and deliver value more quickly.
WSO2's main product, Tungsten, is built up from several other free software projects, and provides an interesting demonstration of the benefit of open source: the fact that you can mix different ingredients to create new concoctions in the bubbling cauldron of collaborative innovation.
Wikipedia must be doing something right that it has so many eminences ranged against it. First Carr, then Lanier (with multiple comments) and now McHenry.
Er, who, you may say? Well, he's the former editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, and author of these fine words:The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
Well, he's back, with somewhat more measured thoughts on the subject:What is the user meant to take away from the experience of consulting a Wikipedia article? The most candid defenders of the encyclopedia today confess that it cannot be trusted to impart correct information but can serve as a starting-point for research. By this they seem to mean that it supplies some links and some useful search terms to plug into Google. This is not much. It is a great shame that some excellent work – and there is some – is rendered suspect both by the ideologically required openness of the process and by association with much distinctly not excellent work that is accorded equal standing by that same ideology.
What does one take away? I can only speak from my own personal experience.
I routinely use Wikipedia to check concepts that I come across online. If I know nothing about them, I look them up. At the very least, Wikipedia will tell me something that I did not know before. Of course, I don't know for sure that what I am told is absolutely correct, but at least I have moved on from total ignorance. I can then formulate a search strategy that is likely to give me further information - perhaps confirmatory, perhaps not.
If, on the other hand, I do have a vague idea about the concept I'm looking up, it acts as a refresher: I can soon gauge whether what I am told is roughly what I understood before. This may be enough, or if not, it may again suggest further avenues for thought.
In other words, Wikipedia is a springboard, in a way that Google is not (and I use Google even more than I use Wikipedia). For me, that's quite enough, and I can only hope that Wikipedia continues to expand to provide even wider coverage. Better, where necessary, can come later.
La La is a clever enough idea: trading your old CDs. But it's also perfectly nuts that this should be legal - which it is - but trading digital tracks isn't.
Yes, I know, you can keep your track while selling it in this case - but, hey, welcome to the digital age. Whatever La La is, it shows how gaga the music industry is for being incapable of coping with this change. (Via Searchblog.)
Well, that's what the OSCar takes its name from, apparently. But more interesting is the thinking behind the move:Hitherto we have encouraged this through intellectual property rights, which harness the efforts of innovators, for the good of all, by granting a monopoly. But is this the best way? The example of Linux software would suggest not. The "Open Source" philosophy can incentivise a community to innovate for the good of all without restricting access to the output. The rate of progress is higher, the technology can spread more rapidly and the benefits are more equitably distributed.
This betrays the origin of the name OSCar - Open Source Car. Expect to hear a lot more about it.
(Via LXer.)
The World Trade Organisation's TRIPS - Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights - is one of the most powerful tools of the intellectual monopolist world, and one that most have never heard of. It's often used by "developed" countries - that is, those who place a heavy emphasis on intellectual monopoly law - to force the same on other countries. Now, some of these are daring to fight back, as this story explains:The world’s largest developing countries are seeking an amendment to international trade rules to provide more protection for genetic resources and traditional knowledge used in patent applications, and have presented the amendment proposal to other governments with mixed results.
Whether or not this is accepted, it is important, for two reasons. First, that these countries are daring to stand up to the intellectual monopoly bullies, and second, because it shows that TRIPS is not engraved in stone - that it can be changed. As it must.
Good to see that someone else gets it: the office market is all about formats. Which is why the absence of ODF support from the Google spreadsheet is worrying - although this piece seems to think that "ODF support is only a matter of time." Let's hope so.
There's an interesting article in the New York Times about the complex realities that lie behind the cuddly concept of "organic" food - and how it's not quite as easy as banging a certain kind of label on food. I particularly liked this formulation:As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the well-being of the animals we eat. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto of our conventional food system — at the center of which stands Wal-Mart, the biggest purveyor of cheap food in America — should be: Cheap at any price!
This is a key point that most people do not get - one, indeed, that I had never thought about until recently. And until more of us do start thinking about it - and acting on it - I fear the world is in big, big trouble. (Via Against Monopoly.)
I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons project (not surprisingly). But the point of the sister project, the Science Commons, has always escaped me. So it's good to see the launch of the Scholar's Copyright project, since I can finally see what they are up to.
There's a very thorough explanation of why the Scholar's Copyright is necessary. Basically, it aims to codify certain kinds of rights that scientists want to retain, such as being able to place copies of their published work in repositories under a CC licence, or release papers freely after a certain period. This is achieved through a series of "Author Addenda" (you can tell you're dealing with academics, can't you?):"Author Addenda" - a suite of short amendments that authors attach to the copyright transfer form agreements from publishing companies. The Addenda ensure, at a minimum, that scholarly authors retain enough rights to archive their work on the public Internet.
The three addenda are as follows: * The OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version (for example, as a .pdf file) immediately and to grant others a Creative Commons "Attribution NonCommercial" license to use the article.
* The OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version immediately upon publication.
* The OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the author's final manuscript version immediately and the published version six months after publication.
These look eminently sensible, and should help scientists (and others) fight for the right to post their work online without needing to hire a team of lawyers to do so. It's sad that such "concessions" need to be wrung from publishers in the first place, but, hey, nobody said OA was going to be easy.
As I have hinted heavily, I interviewed Larry Lessig recently; you can find the result in today's Guardian or here.
What this doesn't convey is the four-hour journey it required to meet him, including several trains and a 30-minute taxi ride that took 15 minutes at the hands of sexagenarian who fancied himself as a rally driver (and who insisted on using his mobile while driving, just to add to the challenge). This was to reach Hay-on-Wye, where Lessig was giving a talk as part of the festival there.
The result also fails to convey anything of the experience of listening to that lecture, whose style was in striking contrast to the one-to-one interview (conducted partly in the back of a car) itself. Where Lessig is quiet almost to the point of timidity in private, in public he soars.
His oratory - for it is nothing less - is built from two elements: a powerful rhythmic sense that drives forward inexorably the logic of his lecture, and a strangely-effective sing-song voice that shifts between a set of frequencies according to the points he is emphasising. Impressive.
Why do I have a horrible feeling this is a symbol of something? (Via BoingBoing.)
Well, not quite: but it's a book on the same, by the bloke who probably did more than anyone to scupper the attempt to push through a deeply-flawed software patent regime in Europe last year. As his blog explains, Florian Mueller is making the book freely available under a CC licence. You can choose either the original German, or else an English version.
Sadly, while the battle may have been won, the war is far from over. The next threat is something called the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA): Florian has some background, plus a link to a fuller document. Time to gird your loins again, folks.
This is "only" in the US, but as we know, like the plague, these things have a habit of spreading. It's proposed new legislation called SIRA. As the EFF site explains:SIRA's main aim is clearing the way for online music services by revising the current mechanical compulsory license set out in Section 115 of the Copyright Act to accommodate "full downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams." So far so good, but the devil is in the details. This license specifically includes and treats as license-able "incidental reproductions...including cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions."
By smuggling this language into the Copyright Act, the copyright industries are stacking the deck for future fights against other digital technologies that depend on making incidental copies. Just think of all the incidental copies that litter your computer today -- do you have a license for every copy in your browser's cache?
This is the key point: every time you view a Web page you make a copy; every time you play a CD, you make a copy. As the wise Larry Lessig put it to me recently: "in a digital age, copying is as natural as breathing."
Indeed, we need to take the copy out of copyright: it's not about copying, it's about publishing. But this SIRA thing is going in the opposite direction, explicitly making even incidental and evanescent copying something that needs to be regulated and approved. Bad news, people. (Via BoingBoing.)
Update: Not looking good so far.
I try not to comment reflexively on Google's every move, but this news that it's coming out with a Web-based spreadsheet just fits too nicely with what I was saying about ajaxLaunch. It really is a case of Why Microsoft is Doomed, Part 460....
The interesting question is whether the new Google spreadsheet will be able to read OpenOffice.org files (and they'd be fools not to).
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