Google Earth Moves - to GNU/Linux

Another excuse for not moving to open source on the desktop disappears.

Untangling FLOSS

LXer sent me to this story called "Brainstorming ways to push open source". I can't really see that it has much to do with brainstorming, but I notice that its about work done by Rishab Ghosh, from the Merit/Infonomics research institute in The Netherlands.

Ghosh is one of the leading European researchers on open source, although sadly he insists on calling it by the ridiculous name "FLOSS". Now, call me conventional, but floss is something I associate with cleaning my teeth, rather than with changing the world, so I find this a pretty silly name. Luckily, this doesn't detract from the value of the work Ghosh has done/is doing.

However, finding that work is another matter. The article mentioned above refers to equally daftly-name FLOSSpols site, which seems to be what the brainstorming refers to. However, in another feat of mind-bending misnaming, the work arising out of FLOSSpols is hidden away under the heading "deliverables" - what ordinary human beings would call reports. It might have been nice (a) to have used the word "report", and (b) to have a clear link to where they can be found.

All this persiflage is particularly sad because the reports look particularly good: I've not read through them completely, because they are long and detailed. But it would be a great pity is such valuable work did not reach a wider audience, but remained, instead, tied up in a tedious tangle of floss.

Why Analysts are a Waste of Skin

Social networks, mobile video and "Googlism" will continue to transform the Net in years ahead, Piper Jaffray analysts said Monday at the opening of its annual Global Internet Summit.

Just two questions:

(1) why did C|net squander valuable electrons to publish this?

And - well, the second one is rather like the quotation.

Microsoft's Bugs: Just Like Christmas

It's sad to see the generally solid BBC news reporting on the latest mega-patch from Microsoft with a real lack of context. It's as if Microsoft bugs were as natural and as inevitable as Christmas: both of them just keep coming around, and, well, it's that time again, so let's tell the readers.

This is so misleading: every time Microsoft issues these huge fixes should be an occasion to remind people that this is shoddy programming on a serious scale. Not only that, but a certain Bill Gates has already recognised it as a problem and pledged that he was really serious about solving it:

In the past, we've made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible. We've done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won't matter unless customers trust our software. So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve.

The date? 15 January 2002.

Four years later, and the situation is not one whit better, as this latest security update shows. Memo to BBC: next time it's Christmas, could we do a little more than simply hanging up the mistletoe?

Why, Yes, You Do Use Humour Effectively...

...to communicate your hints and tips about OpenOffice.org.

International Terrorism is a Minor Threat...

...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.

Open Source's Secret Weapon

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.

I Feel the Wind from Other Planets

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?

Make Your Views Patent

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.)

In Bandit Country

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.

Something Happened

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.

Will They Digg Digg for Non-Nerds?

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.

Microsoft Gets Scobleized

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.

RMS on "IP"

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.

OpenOffice.org Deployment - the Blog

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 Goes for a Ramble on the Commons

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.

The Glue that is Hot, Hot, Hot

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.

Let's All Whack Wikipedia

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.

From La La to Gaga

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.)

The Open Source Car

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.)

Tripping up TRIPS

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.

It's the Formats, Stupid

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.

The Truth About Organic Food

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.)

Fighting for a Scholar's Copyright

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.

More on Lessig

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.