It's early days yet, but somebody's hoping to put together a database of all human gene variations, dubbed the "Human Variome Project". One intriguing comment:The HVP also needs an estimated US$60 million over five years - and it is not yet clear where that money will come from, though web giant Google has said it is interested in providing some funds
Whoops, there's that Googling the genome meme again....
Originally I was going to leave this article on iCommons and the global digital commons alone, since it doesn't really deserve Margaret's "oxygen of publicity", but upon re-reading parts of it, I feel that some of the crasser assertions shouldn't go unchallenged.
For example:The Creative Commons project is a curiously inverted attempt to use a private property regime to reproduce a "common" (understood, for me at least, as a non-owned culturally shared space of culture, knowledge or ideas). Put another way, Creative Commons seems to be attempting to create a shared public resource through a clever bit of tweaking of copyright, without the messy and difficult problems of educating citizens to the important of a public domain (or "common" good).
Well, actually it's just doing what Stallman did with the GNU GPL 20 years ago: if you understand the GPL, you understand what the Creative Commons is trying to do, and how.
Or:In one way this raises questions about to what extent national states' sovereign control of their intellectual property law can be transcended in this way. It raises important questions about how this project might be perceived as a threat to the national interest of any single state. Will governments be happy to watch their cultural products seep away into an American founded "common" or will they legislate to make Creative Commons type projects illegal or regulated?
The idea of the commons is well-nigh universal concept that has only been lost in recent years; moreover, by definition, it's for everyone: it doesn't take away, it gives. "[I]ntellectual property law", on the other hand, of whatever "sovereign nation", nearly always takes away, because it simply defines the intellectual monopolies it grants.
Or even:There may also be concern from a western perspective about the leaking out of protective national spheres of certain technologies and knowledges (issues raised by encryption software or GNU /Linux giving a technological boon to software development skills in China, for example).
I'm speechless: so we're worried about all those nasty furriners getting all this dangerous high-techy stuff like encryption (which they have already) or even - Heaven forfend! - that these Chinese devils might learn to program.
There, I knew I shouldn't have given it that blast of oxygen.
And another one:The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is to be the standard format for exchanging documents within the government, according to a proposal that is expected to be approved by Belgium's Council of Ministers on Friday. The plan increases the pressure from governments worldwide on Microsoft to embrace open standards.
Update: And maybe India too, one day?
At times it seems that discussions about Wikipedia generate more heat than light. Even the supposedly objective comparison of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica made by Nature has descended into an ugly scholars' brawl. So it is something of a surprise - and a blissfully pleasant one at that - to come across a discussion of Wikipedia that is insightful, fair, well-written and downright fascinating.
The essay in question is called "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past", and it's written by Roy Rosenzweig, Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University.
The essay is long, but it is well-worth reading all the way through its detailed comparison of Wikipedia and conventional reference works (there's a fine summary at the The Institute for the Future of the Book if you really need it). One of its shrewdest observations is the following:Overall, writing is the Achilles’ heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people. Some Wikipedians contribute their services as editors and polish the prose of different articles. But they seem less numerous than other types of volunteers. Few truly gifted writers volunteer for Wikipedia.
This piece stands as simply the best writing on Wikipedia yet. (Via Openpedia.org.)
Larry Ellison has been teasing about coming out with his own GNU/Linux distribution for a while, and he's at it again. This time, he makes a good point:Observing that Linux is free to anybody and that the current Linux distributions don't own their IP, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that Oracle could just go and take Linux, and support it better than anyone else and become the "number one distributor."
Do it, Larry, just do it: at best, you might just succeed; at worst, it will be an educational process for you.
Ed Felten is one of the original geek heroes, for reasons this TechDirt post explains. Such a hero, it seems, that he's high on the content industry's hit-list as the Man Who Knew Too Much. Now they are trying to re-write history and cast him in a different light, as Tim Lee has spotted.
The revisionism comes from one of those institutes whose name is entirely made up of misleadingly neutral terms - "Policy Innovation", in this case. This is generally a clear sign that it is anything but neutral, and usually funded by those with vested interests in the field it covers.
I can't find any information on the site about where the money comes from: maybe it's done out of pure love of intellectual monopolies and unbridled capitalism.
Some nicely provocative journalism from Business 2.0. Alongside the dull and entirely predictable list of "50 people who matter" is the infinitely more interesting "10 people who don't matter". And who should we find amongst them but that nice Mr. Torvalds.
And in a way, it's true. As I wrote in Rebel Code five years ago:Linus is unique because he was able to serve as a focal point for ... advances to come together to create a complete methodology that is now central to the continuing success of the open source movement and that offers the first plausible alternative to the current - and creaking model of software development. But Linus is also replaceable because of this methodology, which allows programming and architectural decisions to be relegated to specialised circles of experts; and thanks to this methodology even his leadership style - that of power wielded in subservience to the user base - can be distributed more widely.
You wouldn't expect something with as grey a name as the Open Management Consortium (OMC) to be hugely important. True, it deals with a crucial area, that of systems and network management. But the real interest lies elsewhere.
For probably the first time, an extensive group of open source companies are consciously joining together to address a new market. To the six original members of the group, many others are being added. Most of these, it is true, are quite small, but some are increasingly well-known names in their own right - for example, Hyperic, which only recently converted to open source.
These moves matter because they suggest that open source is passing to the next level, where individual companies stop acting alone and start working together to offer complete solutions that are otherwise only available from established proprietary behemoths. I predict that this "OMC model" will become increasingly widespread in the world of open source enterprise software.
I hate Flash. But just suppose it were possible to use it for something else, other than mindless, TV-style animations.
Enter Fjax. Ignore the buzzword overload - "Fjax is the lightweight, cross-browser, rapid-development methodology for Ajax-style web 2.0 development" - and you find its real purpose is to redeem Flash:Fjax, short for Flash/JavaScript/and Asynchronous XML, is about using Flash as an invisible parsing engine to seamlessly deliver XML-based pure (x)HTML content interactively to browsers, all on the client-side. The kicker is that Fjax typically weighs in at a tenth of the size of normal Ajax solutions.
Keeping it simple (the http://www.fjax.net website runs on less than 65 lines of Fjax code - weighing only 4 total kilobytes!) means quick, light-weight code that is easily editable. Since the XML parsing happens in Flash, 90% of the redundant browser-specific code in a typical Ajax application completely disappears! And unlike the other Flash and Ajax integration projects out there, the outcome of Fjax is not Flash and (x)HTML, but a pure (x)HTML experience (which could contain an integrated visual Flash experience, but that isn’t required).
Using Flash to produce ordinary, non-Flash Web content more efficiently: utterly brilliant. God knows what their business model is, though. (Via eHub.)
I was giving the PLoS bloggers some grief over the absence of any postings about the financial situation there - not so much because I think the latter is serious (I don't - I'm with Jan Velterop on this), more that one of the great things about blogs is that they permit very rapid responses.Chris Surridge Mark Patterson has now addressed this issue. Several other posts show that he his colleague, Chris Surridge, is keeping a close eye on the blogosphere, and beginning to respond more quickly to comments on other blogs. Given the path that PLoS ONE seems to be taking, this kind of awareness and interaction will be absolutely crucial to its success.
It's also good to see some technical details of PLoS ONE emerging - and that everything is resolutely open source.
As Oscar Wilde might have said, "To lose one CxO may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."
The news that both the CEO and CFO have been booted out at Novell is a Bad Sign. Much as I cheered Novell's decision to jump on the open source bandwagon, in my heart of hearts, I feared that it was going to end in tears.
Remember, Novell refused to adopt TCP/IP for many years, as it tried to defend its proprietary IPX/SPX. Just how wrong can you be?
Interesting point in this Computerworld blog posting:If you read way down to the bottom of a Wall Street Journal interview with Bill Gates that ran yesterday, you'll discover that the Microsoft executive admitted to watching pirated movies on the Internet.
Unfortunately, Wall Street Journal is subscribers only. But the key exchange was the following:WSJ: But those were stolen, correct?
Gates: Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.
Yes, stolen is a strong word - and the wrong word. Nobody lost anything when Gates viewed those YouTube videos. On the contrary, those who produced that content gained something hugely valuable: the attention of the richest man in the world. Gates was actually giving, not taking, and he was right not to accept the WSJ's simplistic description.
This exchange alone shows why most thinking about copyright and its so-called infringement is wrong-headed, and why this whole area needs to be re-thought in the light for the digital age. Alas, the blog posting's analysis gets it completely the wrong way round. (Via Digg.)
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 produceda 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....
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....
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).
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.)
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.)
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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