The GNU and "L"-ephant in the Room

Nearly a great piece in The New York Times about Google's vertiginous expansion of its hardware platform:

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world.

Great, except for the fact that it misses out one key piece of information: that nearly all of those servers are running GNU/Linux. Kinda relevant, don't you think, John, baby?

Open Mobile Linux Platform

The success of GNU/Linux as a server operating system is well known. It's lack of success on the desktop is exaggerated. But what many tend to forget is that GNU/Linux is increasingly widely deployed in everyday devices - music players and mobile phones. Indeed, the overall use in such devices probably exceeds its appearance elsewhere.

Further proof of the importance of this sector - if any were needed - is provided by the creation of "the world's first global, open [GNU/]Linux-based software platform for mobile devices" as the press release puts it. And it has some serious support: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone.

A Review of Open Peer Review

I've mentioned before the idea of going beyond open access, which generally employs traditional peer review of papers, to a totally open peer review system. One attempt to implement this is Biology Direct.

The chief movers behind this journal - Eugene Koonin, David Lipman, Ros Dignon and Laura Landweber - have now written an interesting commentary on the first six months' experience. They speak of "cautious optimism about the Biology Direct model". The piece forms part of Nature's continuing examination of peer review and its place in the modern scientific world.

Google, Wal-Mart and the Commons

It's funny how sometimes it all just comes together.

A few days ago, I was quoting approvingly an analysis of how the prices of cheap food at places like Wal-Mart do not reflect the true costs - in terms of damage to the environment, local economies, small farmers etc. And now here is the deeply incomprehensible, but clearly perceptive Umair with some cognate thoughts about Google, its business model and PageRank (inspired by Scott Karp's interesting but depressing posting on linkfarms):

But, of course, there's a loser in this game - there must be, since no attention value is created, but attention is being exchanged. In the end, it's consumers, and, to a much smaller extent, advertisers. Consumers pay by spending attention to which returns are essentially zero, and advertisers pay with clicks whose propensity to consume isn't very high (but not many of them will be so interested in that for another couple of years).

Put another way, It is the expected value of attention of consumers which PageRank is supposed to, somewhat accurately, compute. But as long as there's no real competition in search (and let's be honest - there really isn't), Google can keep shifting the costs of this arbitrage on to consumers.

As Scott puts it, "the media business has been reduced to pure transaction". That's a brilliant statement - he's exactly right. In fact, his statement parallels Mark Pincus's very nice analogy from a few months back - Google as Wal-Mart. The dynamics are very much the same: scale economies are achieved by shifting costs elsewhere; at the expense of consumers, quality, etc.

This naturally led me to the original Google as Wal-Mart posting:

in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. and while it's a beautiful day here in san francisco, it's a sad one for me to see a company with so much promise to help the world, primarily focus on helping itself.

do we really want this form of capitalism? where companies like msft, walmart and now google pacman up industries, turning founders into billionaires who then hopefully make big philanthropic donations back to the community. is this sustainable capitalism? yes we live in a free market and yes we can choose how to come together as ants. united we stand, divided we work for google and walmart.

(Lack of capital letters not mine).

And of course, it all fits together, it all makes sense. Commons sense, of course.

A Pox on Your Genomic Knowledge

Why is the Guardian (disclosure: yeah, lots of my stuff there, too) running this story - on the front page - about one of its journos ordering and receiving some partial sequences of the smallpox virus? This story already broke in 2002, when someone did the same thing for the polio virus - except that they went even further, and produced a complete pathogen.

And frankly, it wasn't even much of story then. After all, once you know the digital genome of an organism, it's just a matter of engineering to produce the analogue instantiation (a mathematician writes).

Oz Anti-DMCA Battle Begins

One of the most pernicious knock-on effects of the DMCA is that US is exporting it to other lands - notably through trade agreements. Australia is a case in point: thanks to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement it is forced to enact "anti-circumvention" laws.

As this page from Linux Australia explains, worse may be in store:

Some large business interests are pressing for the government to restrict legitimate access to digital material, even though the treaty does not require us to do so.

The battle in Australia has begun: maybe we should follow suit and try to roll back some of the more inequitable elements of the EUCD.

Stallman and French PM in Argy-Bargy Shock

A great story: RMS took a petition of 165,000 signatures against the French equivalent of the DCMA to the official residence of the French Prime Minister, since the latter (strangely) refused to grant him an audience. There followed a bit of physical argy-bargy - don't miss the pix.

Great quote from a French version of the story:

Frederic Couchet, de la FSF France, aussi déçu qu'excédé, évoque illico la différence de traitement « entre la réception Bill Gates en chef d'Etat par le président de la République et celle de Richard Stallman par le chef de la sécurité de Matignon ». Stallman croit avoir l'explication : « Gates est l'empereur, nous ne sommes que des citoyens », lâche-t-il calmement.

Life would be so boring without RMS.

Open Source is More Secure - Official

Well, almost. At least the statement comes from someone who should know what he's talking about. Raimund Genes is chief technical officer for anti-malware at the anti-virus vendor Trend Micro, and this is what he had to say:

"Open source is more secure. Period. ... More people control the code base; they can react immediately to vulnerabilities; and open source doesn't have so much of a problem with legacy code because of the number of distributions."

Genes said open-source developers "openly talk about security," so patches are "immediate--as soon as something happens," whereas proprietary vendors with closed code have to rely purely on their own resources to push patches out.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to this. I predict some heavy leaning will ensue....

Re-Joyce: Lessig is on the Case

Here's a fine demonstration of why copyright last too long.

The grandson of James Joyce is apparently deeply unhelpful when it comes to giving permission for extracts from his ancestor's works and letters to be used by academics. In other words, copyright - which is meant to promote learning and all other good things - is directly responsible for impeding the advancement of knowledge.

Now, this is just the kind of thing that gets Larry Lessig riled, so he has decided to fight the good fight on behalf of scholars the world over.

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce.

And he adds this interesting comment:

This is the first in what we expect will be a series of cases defending the boundaries of fair use. Stay tuned.

(Via Ars Technica.)

Update: Wow: and now the Steinbecks are at it, too.

Creative Commons Hits 140 Million

That's the latest estimate of total number of items released under a CC licence. Talk about an idea whose time has come....

The Great IP FUD

As if further proof were needed what a slippery and dangerous concept "intellectual property" - "IP" - is, read this article. Under the innocuous - and misleading - headline "Can Windows and Linux Learn to Play Nice?", Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, serves up the following choice Microsoftian views:

"Open source is a way of building software and, in its most basic sense, there is nothing incompatible [between] the concept of open source and commercial software. But the GPL has an inherent incompatibility that is, to my knowledge, impossible to overcome..."

A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible, Muglia said.

Well, no, Bob, I think you're a little confused here.

A commercial company doesn't have to build intellectual property: it may choose to, it may not. It may choose to sell services, for example, and be jolly successful at that: IBM derives around $40 billion a year from services, and IP doesn't enter it (although it does elsewhere in the company's activities).

And the GPL, "by its very nature" not only allows intellectual property to be built, but actually depends on it: as I've written before, the GPL works thanks to copyright. In other words, the GPL depends on what is called "IP" (though neither I nor RMS like the term).

So, I'm afraid, Bob, that you are wrong on both counts. Your argument falls to pieces, and the whole eWeek interview emerges as yet another attempt to FUD-muddy the waters - to portray the GPL as that big, bad IP wolf driven to eat up all the innocent little commercial Red Riding Hoods.

Oh, and by the way, notice the subtle trick in the generous concession that "there is nothing incompatible [between] the concept of open source and commercial software" - as if open source and commercial software were somehow on different planets. Well, what about Red Hat's products, or SuSE's: are they commercial or are they open source? Answer: they're both. It's a false opposition that Muglia is trying to set up.

Amusingly, this was an approach that one of the top Microsoft bods in the UK tried with me a few years back, when I was "invited in" to "chat" about open source (i.e. have my brain picked for any useful ploys that might be used against open source). One of the first phrases that came out of the Microsoftie's mouth was something about "non-commercial" software - by which he meant open source. So, I was naturally forced to give him a hard time and point out that the implicit distinction he was making was false, and that our conversation would be a short one if we couldn't clear that up.

Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft is still peddling this particular sophistry.

It's Apache, But Not as We Know It

From the "Because it's there" department: Nokia has ported the Apache Web server to the Symbian mobile phone platform.

Some of the thinking behind the move:

As a mobile phone contains quite a lot of personal data it is easy to semi-automatically generate a personal home page. And contrary to websites in general, a website on a mobile phone always has its "administrator" nearby and he or she can even participate in the content generation. For instance, we have created a web-application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG. That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.

Further, that a website becomes mobile implies that certain properties of websites that hitherto have been mostly meaningless now need to be taken into account. As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the "administrator" to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.

Implications

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

(Via Technocrat.net.)

Of Bloggregation and Blortals

An interesting trend reported here:

Science Blogs, the compilation of science and health blogs run by Seed Magazine, has added 25 new blogs to their collection, which now features a total of 44 science voices.

Is this aggregation of related blogs into blog portals (blortals?) the next online publishing wave?

The Snake is Winding up the Tree

This story about the Berlin Senate opposing the call by the Berlin Parliament for a complete migration to GNU/Linux is so serpentine, and the battle between what seems a prelapsarian innocence and the forces of a wily cynicism so epic - nay, biblical - that I really have no idea what is going on.

To say nothing of the closing comments:

"The snake is winding up the tree," some are murmuring. After "three months of work by highly paid officials and external experts," the result is "not worth the paper it is printed on."

Er, right.

Wise Words of a Blog Heretic

"Thou shalt post at least once a day": that's the golden rule of blogging. Not according to this interesting post from Eric Kintz. The points he makes are good. But he skates over one of the main reasons why I, personally, go into manic multiple post mode (like today): because there are lots of interesting things I want to note for myself.

In effect, the blog becomes like a big online notebook - something I can access and refer to from anywhere. In a way, the premise is that I blog something if it's of interest to me, and relevant to my current concerns, in the hope that it might be of interest to others. So slowing down the blogging is actually something I don't want to do.

Well, not too often. Or, as St Augustine said: "not yet...." (Via C|net.)

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.