Dzongkhalinux - a Himalayan Operating System

Somehow I missed this post on LWN.net about the launch of Dzongkhalinux. Dzongkha, in case you are wondering, is the national language of Bhutan, and a language from the Sino-Tibetan family. As the article explains:

Recent laws in the country have enforced the use of the national language in all official events and all official communication. Therefore, even though all the (free for everybody) education system is bilingual in English/Dzongkha, it is very important for the country to be able to use the Dzongkha language on computers.

After a quite deceptive attempt with Microsoft to include support for Dzongkha in Microsoft operating systems ($523,000 have been thrown in this attempt), the Ministry of Information and Communication launched the DzongkhaLinux project 2.5 years ago.

And it's not just a truly Himalayan operating system (in all senses), since the project has also produced

a complete set of Dzongkha-localised applications, namely the Gnome environment, the OpenOffice suite, the Mozilla web browser, the Evolution mail reader and GAIM as instant messaging application.

This illustrates a number of points.

First, that Microsoft just doesn't care about smaller markets. Second, that open source really is about giving users the freedom to do what they need to do. And third, that there are good open source applications covering all the main areas these days.

There's more about the project here, and even a glimpse of a suitably monkish Tux, swathed in scarlet robes; there's the same information on the Bhutan-based Department of Information Technology site (just love that URL - http://www.dit.gov.bt/), but the connection's understandably slow, and probably best left clear.

There doesn't seem to be a direct link to the Bhutanese distro (again, probably just as well in terms of leaving the connection free); I suppose while I'm waiting for a torrent, I could always start learning Dzongkha....

Hot Under the Collar

A fascinating piece about the insane way air-conditioning has become an indispensable part of people's lives. This is mostly in the U.S., but the economic and social dynamics that are driving what happens there will soon apply in places like China and India.

One terrible irony: thanks to global warming, people are using more air-conditioning; which burns more fuel; which causes more global warming....

Shining Light on Eclipse

I've noted before the importance of Eclipse, "open source's best-kept secret". Here's something useful: an IBM recommended online reading list to get up to speed on the subject. (Via LXer).

Royal Society Wises Up - a Bit

A little while back I wrote in fairly unflattering terms about the Royal Society's attitude to open access. Things seem to have shifted somewhat since then:

The Royal Society today (21 June 2006) launched a trial of an open access' journal service, which will allow people to read new scientific papers free of charge immediately after they are published on the web. The new service offers authors the opportunity to pay a fee to have their paper made freely available on the web immediately if it is accepted for publication by any Royal Society journal. The first paper to be published under the new service appears on the Royal Society's website today.

That's good, although the pricing structure is sufficiently high as to discourage most people from taking this option. And despite what the press release says, I can't find the first OA article on the Web site: I've looked moderately hard, and after 13 years of Web-life, I'm not unskilled at finding stuff online.

So the move is probably more useful for pro-OA propaganda purposes than anything else; in particular, it may help some of the other important decisions that are due to be made on mandating open access, for example, those in the UK and Europe. (Via Open Access News.)

Undermining the Case for Long Film Copyrights

One of the arguments given for protecting films with long terms of copyrights is that they are very costly to make, and so film producers require long periods for full payback. It is certainly true that many films are obscenely expensive today, but whether they need to be is another matter.

For those, like me, who argue that films will become progressively cheaper to make as technology advances (and open source software takes over), without any substantial loss in perceived quality, an article in the Washington Post provides some useful ammunition.

According to the story:

Chris Moukarbel was intrigued by director Oliver Stone's latest project, a $60 million movie to be released this summer about two police officers rescued from the rubble of the twin towers.

But as a 28-year-old filmmaker, Moukarbel wanted to do more than simply watch Stone's "World Trade Center." He decided to create his own version -- using a bootleg copy of the screenplay and Yale University student actors -- and offer it free on the Internet.

...

According to its lawsuit, which was filed Friday, the studio is afraid that people will see the student film on the Internet and confuse it with the big-time Hollywood version set to hit 1,500 screens on Aug. 9 and backed up with a $40 million marketing campaign.

Well, if that's the case, it can only be because you don't actually need to spend $60 million to make such a film. So it looks like Hollywood is digging itself into a fine hole here. (Via Techdirt.)

Linuxcare Lives - or Does It?

A few months ago I interviewed Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati. Doing so brought back memories of the previous time I'd interviewed him, when he was CTO of Linuxcare.

The idea behind Linuxcare was a good one: to act as a 24x7 support service for all the main free software programs - and thus plug what many saw as the big gap in the open source offering for corporates. It was a great idea, and they had some great people, but the company crashed and burned for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with that idea, in one of the more spectacular crashes of the dotcom meltdown.

Given this history, I was amazed to learn that Linuxcare lives on, as a company now called Levanta. Or rather, reading the BusinessWeek story on the latter, it seems that Linuxcare has gradually morphed into something else:

Levanta sells a box that connects to all of a company's Linux servers. The customer's software and applications actually run through that box, not individually on each server. That means that if a server crashes, there's a backup for that data. Or, if administrators need to switch an application from a test server to a more reliable one, it's just a few mouse clicks away.

I can't help feeling that an outfit that has changed its management, name and product isn't really the outfit I knew those years back. And so, for me, this strange, zombie-like resurrection is more of an end than a beginning.

Microsoft's GNU/Linux Gnasher is now Ex

Some of you may remember the Microsoftie Martin Taylor, who had the unenviable job of arguing Microsoft's corner against open source a few years back. Well, he is now an ex-Microsoftie. Or as his official bio puts its tersely:

Martin Taylor is no longer with Microsoft.

(Via PaidContent.org.)

MS Does CC

Microsoft has released an add-in that enables you to embed Creative Commons licences directly into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. As Larry Lessig is quoted as saying:

This is important to us because a huge amount of creative work is created inside the Office platform. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses obviously helps us spread those licenses much more broadly.

To Microsoft's credit, this is not the first time that it has supported Creative Commons. When the latter was short of cash recently, Microsoft coughed up $25,000 - hardly a huge sum for the company, but laudable, nonetheless. (Via C|net.)

One of the Digital Commons

OpenDemocracy has a piece called "Free culture and the internet: a new semiotic democracy". Apart from the obfuscatory title, it's quite good. It's basically about open content, which it calls "the digital commons". This isn't quite right: it's a digital commons, since there are lots of them these days - open source, open access, etc.

The article is written by Elizabeth Stark, who's a board member of the international student organisation Freeculture.org. The latter is new to me, and has an interesting background:

FreeCulture.org is a diverse, non-partisan group of students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in the free culture movement. Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College, FreeCulture.org has helped establish student groups at colleges and universities across the United States. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters exist at over 30 colleges, from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.

FreeCulture.org was founded by two Swarthmore students after they sued voting-machine manufacturer Diebold for abusing copyright law in 2003. Named after the book Free Culture by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, FreeCulture.org is part of a growing movement, with roots in the free software / open source community, media activists, creative artists and writers, and civil libertarians. Groups with which FreeCulture.org has collaborated include Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Downhill Battle.

Dosh Probs and the PLoS Blog

Nature has as story that reports (doubtless with a certain satisfaction) on some looming financial probs at PLoS. As Nature also notes:

PLoS will next month hike the charge for publishing in its journals from US$1,500 per article to as much as $2,500

in an effort to staunch some of the likely losses (though even with the "hike", it's still a bargain).

As far as I can tell, there's no comment yet from the PLoS blog on these matters. Here's a hint, chaps: that's what blogs are for.... (Via Open Access News.)

Update: There's now a comment.

TechDirt's Cleansing Power

You won't learn much new here about the pathetically bent and dirty minds of the MPAA and RIAA, but you will emerge oddly cleansed by the sheer power of the prose. Complimenti, Carlo.

A Study in Stupidity

I am constantly amazed at how many people do not get what net neutrality is about. Cunningly, the telecoms companies frame this in terms of providing "superior" services for certain classes of data traffic - conveniently skating over the fact that creating a first class inevitably demotes everyone else to second class or worse.

The key point about network neutrality is that it ensures a level playing-field - a commons, no less, open to all - and does not attempt to second-guess the intentions of those who will exploit that commons. Those who fight against it forget all the history of the Internet - how none of the services that run across it was planned, but was simply able to take the basic infrastructure for granted.

This is not rocket science; and yet we can still have nominally insightful people writing stuff like this:

there's a huge analytical leap between preventing patently anticompetitive conduct and having the government tell operators how to manage their networks in the name of network neutrality. Unfortunately, as election politics loom large, many in Congress are ignoring this important distinction. They instead are seeking to rush through legislation that would essentially commoditize the Internet into a "stupid" network, without understanding the potential adverse consequences.

A commoditised, stupid network that gets out of the way is precisely what we want, for reasons that this excellent essay explains:

This ability to "just do it" liberates huge amounts of innovative energy. If I have a Stupid Network and I get an idea for a communications application, I just write it. Then I send it to my buddy, and my buddy can install it, too. If we both like it, we can send it to more people. If people really like it, then maybe we can charge for it - or even start our own company. Yahoo!

Or Google, or Amazon or eBay.

There are no "adverse consequences" if that stupidity is implemented in a technical sense. Equally, this is not a question of "having the government tell operators how to manage their networks": all they know - and all they need to know - is that every IP packet must be treated the same. It's a simple engineering-based condition. To say - or indeed ask for - anything else is just, well, stupid.

Pass the Sugar(CRM), Please

Some interesting figures on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sector in this item, which seems to predict rocky times ahead for Oracle. Well, I certainly concur with that, but there's a name that is conspicuous by absence in this analysis: SugarCRM.

Why is it important, given that it is currently way behind the leaders? SugarCRM is different from the others, because it's open source. This means that all those good dynamics of the open source world are starting to kick in, in terms of cost, in terms of customer loyalty and in terms of development. And as I've said before, you just can't buy open source companies as you might something like Siebel or PeopleSoft, and this poses a big problem not just to Oracle, but SAP and Microsoft too.

And if you don't believe me, you might care to look at BusinessWeek's thoughts on the matter: its analysis is not as bullish, but is strikingly upbeat.

Closing the Censorship Loop

Censorship is nothing new: ever since there has been power, it has feared knowledge. The trouble is, as people become more dependent on online information, it gets easier to censor, as well as easier to find out information. It all depends on the structure of information access.

That's what makes this story about the LA Times censoring the Internet feed into its newsroom deeply troubling. Since the censorship will naturally block out lots of uncomfortable things - like censorship - this closes the loop, at least in that environment. Journalists there might not even know that they don't know about something.

Let's just hope that the LA Times journalists have lots of fast Internet connections at home, and that they do plenty of Web wandering to find out alternative points of view.

Wireless Meshes and Net Neutrality

The recent brouhaha over net neutrality has emphasised how important it is to have a completely independent way of accessing the Internet. The obvious approach would be to use a wireless mesh: linking thousands of disparate wireless networks together to create a larger, wide-area coverage. TechDirt has an interesting meditation on this idea, pointing out that there are various obstacles to be overcome.

Nobody said it would be easy.

Craigslist: the Open Source Company

The Wall Street Journal has a good story on Craigslist:

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?

Well, an open source kind of company. And try this:

"It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

An open source kind of world, perhaps. (Via Slashdot.)

Microsoft's Other Monopoly

I've often wondered about this.

Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer of Opera Software, has a positively wonderful post about "Microsoft's forgotten monopoly":

The story of how Microsoft used its monopoly in operating systems to acquire a dominant position in office applications and browsers has often been told. But there's another Microsoft monopoly that's rarely mentioned, even though most of us see it every day--right in front of our eyes.

Microsoft's fonts are used to display most Web pages on the planet. Even Linux and Mac users, who often have fled Windows to avoid dependence on Microsoft, read most of their content using Microsoft fonts.

His solution?

The time has come to break the Microsoft monopoly on fonts. This is easier than it sounds. There are thousands of font families on the Web--I call them Web fonts--that are freely available for anyone to use.

...

Just as the visual appearance of the Web changed dramatically when images were introduced by Mosaic in 1993, the Web can change yet again if browsers start supporting Web fonts. I believe it will benefit everyone on the Web.

Except, perhaps, the monopolist.

The Great Blog Carnival of the Vanities

Blogs are by their nature interactive and cross-referential. Their posts are often about other blog posts, and they encourage comments, which are then commented on, and may link to other blogs. But there is little in the way of formal structures gathering them together. Little, that is, apart from the blog carnival.

I first came across this concept when I took part in one - Tangled Bank number 51, to be precise. Carnivals are essentially self-selected groups of blog posts, submitted by the authors to a site that acts as a host for a particular topic. The host may be fixed or rotating. But the end-result is the same: a thought-provoking collection of items on a theme.

A good example that I came across today is the carnival Mendel's Garden, hosted at "The force that through..." (great blog name, Dylan). I especially liked the RNAi introduction that was included in the carnival, but then that's me all over.

If you want to find out more about carnivals, there's a whole site devoted to them. According to a page there, one of the first blog carnivals was called, appropriately enough, "Carnival of the Vanities". Alas, it seems to have slipped through the wormholes of cyberspace, but you can catch a glimpse of it frozen in time thanks to the Internet Archive.

Deliciously Open

It may be heretical to admit it, but I'm not a big user of bookmarks, either online or offline. Certainly, I have my del.icio.us account, but I find that this blog is a better place to dump my bookmarks (sorry, gentle reader).

Nonetheless, if you're going to use bookmarks, you may as well use an open bookmarking service like MarkaBoo. The man behind it is really trying:

My other number one priority tomorrow will be to get the seal of approval on a more conventional open source license. Right now I’m really only tossing around three possibilities: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (dropping the non-commercial requirement), the GPL (de-facto open source standard), or just pulling out all the stops and going with the MIT license. What do you think?

Good question: which do you prefer? (Via TechCrunch.)

Wikis: the New Blogs?

It's interesting how more companies are hoping that wikis are the new blogs. Mr Wikipedia himself was an early player here, with his Wikia. Now here comes Wetpaint (where do they get these names?). TechCrunch reckons that:

The service is incredibly easy to use (Jotspot comes close, but isn’t as mass-user friendly) - and it may bring a much larger audience to wikis than are currently comfortable using them.

I can see why blogs have taken off: it's vanity writing - a chance for the world to enjoy your wit and wisdom. But wikis are almost anti-vanity, since you let people scribble all over your precious masterpiece. Can't see it being so big, myself.

Flashiness Beats Reality

Bad news according to this story: Flash has jumped ahead of Real to become the number 2 video format (after Microsoft's Windows Media). The rise of Flash is particularly tiresome given that there are good open alternatives like Theora and OpenLaszlo.

Podcasters of the World, Unite!

I'm no huge fan of the poddy world (with notable exceptions), which I think is something of a fad, currently; but I certainly wouldn't want it to disappear. So it's good to see the podcasters getting together to fight the underhand WIPO moves I've reported on before. Good luck podboys and podgirls. (Via Boing Boing and Blogger News Network.)

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons

So through bribes the Japanese have bought the passage of a shameful resolution that flies in the face of science and commonsense. They argue that since whales are more plentiful, they can be hunted. But the only reason whales are more plentiful is because they have not been hunted for 20 years: start hunting them again, and they will be forced to extinction, and there will be no whales for hunting - or anything else.

There's a name for this: it's called the Tragedy of the Commons, and was articulated more than 30 years ago in a famous essay by Garrett Hardin. Basically, it says that selfish use of a common resource leads to the loss of that resource - exactly as Japan seems hell-bent on proving. If the commercial whaling ban is indeed lifted, history will rightly judge them and their allies - including, surprisingly, the previously civilised Denmark - harshly.

The Commons: a Matter of Life or Death

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO):

An estimated 24% of the global disease burden and 23% of all deaths can be attributed to environmental factors.

In other words, the health of the environmental commons and of mankind are inextricably linked.

As WHO says:

These findings have important policy implications, because the environmental risk factors that were studied largely can be modified by established, cost-effective interventions. The interventions promote equity by benefiting everyone in the society, while addressing the needs of those most at risk.

Textop: Mashups and Strong Collaboration

Larry Sanger is beginning to emerge as one of the key players in the open content scene. As I've written before, he played an important, if disputed, role in the creation of Wikipedia. Currently, he is one of the driving forces behind the Digital Universe project.

I notice that he now has a blog (subtitle: "Constructing the Digital Universe"), which looks like it could become a must-read for those interested in the world of open content. Take, for example, this post about something called Textop, or the Text Outline Project. There is a summary of the project, as well as a more detailed explanation. This looks fascinating, and consists of several projects:

# The Collation Project, the flagship, will analyze various public domain works studied by scholars (e.g., Classics and history of philosophy) into approximately paragraph-sized chunks, summarize them, and place these chunks into a single outline. Each node of the outline will not have more than, say, a half-dozen chunks, so the outline will be constantly expanding. This will provide a single reference point for comparing the detailed content of scholarly works from throughout history and eventually, it is to be hoped, more recent works as well.

# The Analytical Dictionary Project will sort dictionary definitions and much other lexicographical data not by word but by concept, discussing and distinguishing the senses of words, introducing idioms and jargon, etc., all as part of the Collation Project's outline.

# The Debate Guide Project will describe the dialectical landscape, that is, it will provide fair but in-depth briefs on all sides of controversial issues, perennial and contemporary, academic and popular. The results will be located in the Collation Project's outline.

# The Event Summary Project will provide summaries of events or "stories," aggregating information from news articles and other sources and presenting it in the most neutral possible fashion. Event summaries will be appended to the end of the chronological portion of the Collation Project's outline.

The first of these, the Collation Project, is furthest along. Basically, it seems to be about chunking online texts for the purposes of overlaying extra information - a mashup, in effect. There's a sample screenshot of how this might work in practice.

What's interesting about this Textop project is the attempt to go down a level: that is, to produce not just texts, but a kind of Semantic Web within texts, with information about textual subunits. It's ambitious, but certainly worthwhile.

And I like Sanger's concept of "strong collaboration":

Strong, or radical, collaboration is crucially different from old-fashioned collaboration. Many people who have not worked much with open source software, or with Wikipedia, do not realize this.

Building on this idea, he has a couple of provocative suggestions:

First, speaking to the open source and open content community: I ask you to imagine if the Establishment were to use the methods and principles (including shared ownership and freedom) that you champion. Just imagine what fantastic results would come of that. Imagine that, and then ask yourselves what you can do, perhaps what in your processes and attitudes you can change, to help see to it traditional information producers adopt the really productive parts of your culture. And bear in mind that they love the efficiency collaborative systems display, and they aren't in principle opposed to freedom and openness.

Second, speaking to traditional information producers (including academics): imagine a world, after a new collaborative revolution, in which massive amounts of reliable information, nothing like today's Internet, is available free for all. Isn't that something you would want to use your influence to get behind, if it were possible? If such incredibly useful information resources might very well be created with low overhead, then isn't it worth it, at least as an experiment, to jettison top-down assignment and individual authorship, and to explore the creative possibilities of modest business models necessary to support the modest overhead? It may or may not make you rich; but it might well make the world rich in a way it has never been before.

Well, quite.