The Other WWW: World-Wide Wikipedia

Wikipedia is deservedly famous, but there is a tendency to conflate Wikipedia with the english version of it. One of Wikipedia's many great achievements - alongside its huge size and the innovative partipation of large numbers of people - is that it is energising communities all around the world to create local versions in languages other than English. There is a list of the main languages at the foot of the main English Wikipedia page.

As Wikipedia explains:

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.

Given this global diversity, and the lack of appreciation of efforts outside the Anglophone world, it's good to see that this three-way interview with leading Wikipedians includes voices from Germany and Japan as well as the obvious English one.

Microsoft's Open Source Windows

It looks like at least one person at Microsoft gets it:

One of the things that I’d like to see us do as a company is release a free, Open-Source, stripped-down version of Windows. There are so many benefits, IMO. We could cut out much of the “integration and innovation” and ship a bare-bones, essentials-only operating system with source that would allow the Open Source community to take a look at our code and really build on it. As SaaS (Software as a Service) and Web 2.0 apps take center stage, there is less and less motivation for customers to plunk down their dollars for a completely proprietary OS, and I see Linux gaining steam in that environment unless we are able to do something significant.

Now, the interesting question is whether this is an officially-sanctioned bit of kite-flying or not. I don't think it is; but I do think we will see an open source Windows one day.... (Via Digg.)

UK ID Cards DOA?

Regular/long-suffering readers will know that I am an implacable foe of the UK Government's scheme to make everyone in the country carry ID cards. As well as being a huge waste of money (all £19 billion of it), they will inevitably make us less secure (just ask Bruce Schneier).

So I was delighted to come across this fantastic scoop by The Sunday Times, which suggests that the scheme is much closer to collapse than even I might have hoped. This is based on some killer emails that were leaked to the newspaper by senior civil servants involved in the doomed project.

A sample of their candid views:

This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality.

...

I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.

...

Just because ministers say do something does not mean we ignore reality - which is what seems to have happened on ID Card

And don't miss John Lettice's usual lucid analysis of what all this really means.

A Defence of the Intellectual Commons

Use rights over cultural and scientific information are of fundamental political importance to citizens everywhere. These rights will be deeply affected by the kinds of intellectual property rights we allow to develop. This article argues for positive intellectual commons as a means of increasing freedom and diversity in information societies. Selforganized, positive intellectual commons will become more prevalent as citizens conclude that governments, will not deliver the institutions of knowledge that citizens want.

Which is of course what I have been saying for a while in this blog. But this paper by Peter Drahos puts it rather well; moreover, his background makes him rather better-qualified than I am to give some serious academic justifications for the ideas we share. Do read it. (Via Open Access News.)

The Rules of Open Source Marketing

Over on LWN.net I've an article grandly entitled "The birth of the open source enterprise stack", which has generated a fair amount of comment on the site. At the end, I write:

a subsequent feature will explore the surprising richness of the upper layers of the emerging open source enterprise stack, in areas such as systems management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning and communications.

One of the companies I shall be discussing in the context of enterprise content management is Alfresco, so I was intrigued to come across an extensive think-piece by that company's marketing director, Ian Howells.

It, too, has a rather grandiose title: "10 Rules of Open Source Marketing". It draws heavily on Geoffrey Moore's ideas, but contains some interesting insights of its own. The one that I particularly liked was the following:

Rule 9: Your Software Infrastructure is Key
Dell transformed the PC industry not by selling cheap PCs but transforming the whole value chain and supply chain for PC production. From an operational perspective Open Source isn't about cheap software but about transforming the whole value chain for software across development, testing, translation, product management, marketing, sales and support.

The number of people downloading your software, asking questions, accessing your Web site, accessing demonstrations, trialing the product, discussing in forums, updating the wiki ... is massive compared to a traditional software start-up company. The extended infrastructure has to be able to support contributions, bug reports, and fixes from other individuals/companies, take feedback from forums and surveys, and be able to support hundreds of thousands people downloading your software. In amongst this, you have to be able to identify those who want to buy support, patches, and updates for a mission-critical environment and those who want to use the open source as part of the community. Open Source companies have to be masters of the whole Open Source software value chain to support the massive growth potential.

I really think this idea is the key to why open source will ultimately prevail: it represents a thorough-going re-invention of the entire process of creating, distributing and supporting code. Responses by traditional software companies are necessarily partial - unless they convert to open source themselves - and so by definition insufficient.

Google's Deep Search

We tend to think of Google as an engine that finds matches for concepts, since that's how we frame our searches. But in fact, it's simply matching patterns - just try typing a few random characters into the Google box and searching for them: you'll be amazed what can turn up.

As this article indicates, those patterns could just as easily be binary sequences that go to make up executable files - which are simply a pattern with a different kind of "meaning". This seems to indicate that Google is not just indexing the manifest content of the Web, but the entire - and much larger - binary universe that is accessible in some way online.

A Third of a Million eBooks - Free

I have been rather remiss in not pointing out that the World eBook Fair started last Tuesday. In celebration of the 35th anniversary of the founding of Project Gutenberg:

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

You can either just bung in a search term on the home page given above, or - probably better - go to the full listing of the constituent collections.

I have to say these are pretty impressive. As well as practically every Western classic you could think (already well-covered by Project Gutenberg) there's some interestingly specialist stuff here: for example, Asian classics (don't miss "Response to a Question on the Five Degenerations of the Eon of Strife" - in Tibetan, of course), seriously deep ancient middle eastern texts (Egyptian, Sumerian etc.), tens of thousands of multilingual editions, 8,000 English poems and sheet music.

It's true that these are not all completely open content: many exist in new "editions" which are copyrighted. They also tend to be PDF files, and some scans from books are not very accurate. But it would be churlish to dwell on these deficiencies (none of which applies to the original Project Gutenberg, which is completely open, in the public domain and highly accurate): get downloading and enjoy.

Open Source in Schools: Could Try Harder

A few months back I wrote about open source's big blunder: its neglect of the education sector. So I was naturally curious when I came across a column that began:

I asked for successes at schools using Open Source Software, and I received a wide variety of them.

Alas, the few examples given show a market is that is still, shall we say, learning its ABC. Overall result: could try harder.

The Other Kind of Open Source Languages

I am constantly delighted by the wit and wisdom of TechDirt. The latest example: a nice little meditation on the virtues of "open source" languages like English, where anyone can make up their own words, and that do not have standards bodies à l'Académie française telling people what is and isn't allowed.

It's true that French isn't exactly closed source (I believe you're allowed to write words down across the Channel), but it's a nice conceit.

Where in the World Are...OSS Companies?

If you've ever wondered where all these new and not-so-new open source companies are based, but can't be bothered looking them all up online, here's a nice mashup that shows the physical location of many of them. All we need now is a similar map for all the coders.... (Via Matthew Aslett.)

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 470

Yesterday I passed on a story about a closed source company unilaterally upping its support prices, and simply locking people out of their files if they refused to pay. Now, here's another good reason not to use proprietary systems.

The UK's shiny new IT system for the National Health Service (NHS) is fast becoming the biggest disaster in the history of computing. The latest area to suffer is that of childhood vaccinations:

Child vaccination rates may be falling to risky levels after a new IT system was installed, a health watchdog says.

Ten out of London's 31 primary care trusts have installed new software to manage the vaccine programme as part of a £6.8bn overhaul of NHS computers

...

Richard Bacon, a Tory MP and member of the Commons' Public Accounts Committee, said: "The national vaccination programme has been one of the NHS's greatest successes."

But he added the IT upgrade appeared to be "destroying it at a touch of a button".

And why is this all happening?

A spokesman for NHS Connecting for Health said the new system was implemented at short notice because the previous supplier "withdrew support for its ageing system from the market".

Had this "ageing system" been open source, the NHS could simply have called in another third-party contractor and given them the code. Since it was closed source, it was doomed when the supplier abandoned it, leaving the health system up to its neck in the proverbial.

Nor is this a matter of simple inconvenience: children are likely to die, if herd immunity is gradually lost as a result of these IT failings.

Why Yell Makes Me See Red

According to Wikinews:

Yell, the world's biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down Yellowikis, the wiki-based yellow pages directory.

Yell accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of "misrepresentation", "passing off" and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could "constitute an 'instrument of fraud'."

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Since Yell is apparently a UK company, this makes me ashamed to be British.

Let's look at the situation. You have a multi-billion pound company tied to a dead-tree model - just think of the resources it is wasting - bullying an open, volunteer project that is completely online (and innovative, to boot), through legal threats based on totally outrageous accusations.

Well, guess what?

I am now going to put all my Yell directories in for recycling, in an attempt to undo some of the environmental damage they have caused. And if Yell send me any more (as they are bound to do), I will try to refuse them; if I can't, I will promptly recycle those, too.

Henceforth, I will conduct all of my searches through Yellowikis, with the odd bit of Google thrown in where necessary. When I ring up companies I will make it clear that I never use dead-tree directories, and that they really should go online, maybe with something like Yellowikis, which is completely free. (Via TechDirt.)

Biofuels and the Environmental Commons

Biofuels are much in the news lately. Generally, they are presented as a clever way of getting round oil-dependence, with the added bonus of being environmentally sound: after all, what could be greener than plants?

But step back to look at the bigger picture, and you see that biofuels are no solution; worse, they would actually be disastrous to the environmental commons:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and that used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher.

...

Corn and soybean production as practiced in the Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. Its effects include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen and life from a New Jersey-size portion of the Gulf of Mexico.

Sun Gets Stack Love

After Larry "I'd like to have the complete stack" Ellison, it seems that Sun is joining the Club of Stack Love. Not such a daft idea, actually.

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 469

How about this one?

Some doctors who use Dr. Notes' electronic medical records software say they have been denied access to the program and their patients' medical records because they refused to pay increased technical support fees.

(Via LXer and GPL Medicine.)

Open Source Trains

Well, we've got the open source car, so I suppose it's only fair that there should be open source trains. Sounds like a brilliant solution to the near-total breakdown of rail transport infrastructure in Cambodia. And I'm sure there's a great PhD in there somewhere, tracing the evolution of design as ideas are passed around. (Via Boing Boing.)

A Time There Was

I've noted before how mashups depend upon the existence of some kind of mesh; typically this is geographical (which is why so many mashups draw on Google Earth), but time is another obvious option. A good example of how that might be applied can be seen in the new site The Time When.

The idea is beautifully simple: anyone can write short descriptions of why certain dates are important to them. Alongside the entries, there is information about what happened that day, who the monarch was and so on. But as Antony Mayfield astutely observes, you could go much further:

the application could be used in all sorts of ways - I guess some bright spark there is already mashing it up with Google Earth or some such so the memories can start to hang out in space as well as time, as it were

adding extra dimensions to the mesh.

It's worth pointing out that this idea comes from the BBC, which is fast emerging as a real hotbed of creativity when it comes to applying Web 2.0-ish technologies. And if you want to see want kind of stuff people put in their entries, you could always try this.

The Behemoth Bends to ODF

Wow: it looks like Microsoft has finally admitted that ODF is now too big to ignore. According to the C|net story:

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday is expected to launch the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects that use the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

Open source, too.

This is big, not least because it indicates that ODF is now strong enough to bend even the mighty behemoth.

From the Commons to...Managed Parks?

One of the areas where the commons is being increasingly invoked is that of radio spectrum, the idea being that there can be frequencies "held in common" for the benefit of all. WiFi is a good example, and more and more jurisdictions are looking to create spectrum commons of one kind or another in order to encourage innovation with the minimum of regulation.

But here's an interesting twist from New Zealand, which is considering creating both "public parks" and "managed parks" for radio spectrum:

A "public park" is analogous to common land, with complete freedom of entry balanced by a requirement that users do not interfere with the activities of other licensees. In New Zealand, limits and conditions of use are defined by a General User Licence (GUL). A common condition of use is operation on a non-interference basis which means that a (General User Radio Licence) GURL licensee shall not cause interference to, nor claim protection from, other licensed services. As a result, issues of interference are normally resolved between users, as a matter of common interest.

"Public parks" can be used for a variety of other purposes including, for example, security detectors, cordless phones, radio-controlled devices, medical monitors and RFID labels. It is possible that, at a local level, this may continue to be a satisfactory environment for some broadband service providers.

...

The Ministry has also been considering combining the advantages of the "public park" with features of the spectrum licence, by establishing "Managed Parks". If "public park" spectrum is analogous to common land, then the Managed Park is akin to a publicly-owned sports ground, in that there is a gate-keeper, consent is required to gain admission and users can engage only in the activities for which the facility is provided.

Aren't metaphors a wonderful thing? (Via Openspectrum.info.)

Jimbo's Wikipolitics

Jimmy Wales, (co)-founder of Wikipedia has launched Campaigns Wikia, part of his new Wikia site, the commercial arm of Wikipedia. As the mission statement explains:

For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

NPOV, anyone?

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

With refreshing candour Wales writes:

So, I will frankly admit right up front: I don't know how to make politics healthier. But, I believe that you do. I believe that together we can work, this very election season, to force campaigns to use wikis and blogs to organize, discuss, manage, lead and be led by their volunteers.

Which is fair enough.

Pity that, like The Commons Rising discussed below, his vision has a distinctly parochial feel about it - "this very election season", he writes: not here, mate.

Think big, Jimmy, think global. (Via Boing Boing.)

The Commons Rising

A little while back I wrote about the On The Commons site. It's now launched a new introduction to the area:

The Commons Rising is about the profusion of commons initiatives that are defending and invigorating the commons in all sorts of arenas -- the Internet, natural resources, public spaces, information and culture. We can see the "commons rising" in collaborative websites and ecosystem trusts; in innovative legal tools such as conservation easements and Creative Commons licenses; in new types of social networks such as community gardens and time banks; and in new online communities such as Wikipedia, free and open source software, Craigslist and open science initiatives.

There's nothing startlingly new here, but it's well put, if overly US-centric. If you ever need a short document on the subject to pass on to interested parties, I'd recommend it.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Patentbusters!

This blog has lamented often and loudly about the idiotic patents being granted, principally in the US (but with the EU trying very hard to follow down the same pitiful path). The question is, what can we do about it? Or, to put it another way, who are we going to call? - Patentbusters, of course, in the form of the EFF's Patent Busting project, which seeks to find prior art to invalidate bogus patent claims.

Mind you, with some of the top 10 most wanted, you have to ask why even this is necessary, so blindingly obvious are they. Take ClearChannel, for example, which somehow has a patent for

A system and method for recording live performances (e.g. music concerts), editing them into tracks during the performance, and recording them to media (e.g. CDs) within minutes of the performance ending.

Well, that must have been really hard to invent.

Wikifying Search with Swickis

Swickis are an interesting idea. As their mother-ship, Eurekster, explains:

A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you're interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.

If you want to see one in action, try archival, which helps you "find texts, images, audio, art, public-domain images and information, electronic books, and archival media." The interesting bit is that once you have done a search, you can suggest re-orderings of the results - just mouse over the entry, and use the options that appear to the right.

The Curse of the Open Source IPO

There's a nice round-up of open source IPOs by Matthew Aslett. I'm not sure Trolltech really counts as a full open source company, but I'm probably being a bit harsh given its dual-licensing approach.

What's interesting about this trip down memory lane is that it makes clear just how painful the IPO experience has been for open source companies. A warning, surely, for those that come after.

ODF in MA: Open and Shut?

The roller-coaster ride of ODF in Massachusetts continues. After the extraordinary blasting the decision had received, which seemed to place its future in the balance, it now looks like things are still steaming ahead. This one will run and run.