EU Software Patents Battle 2.0

Florian Mueller, who did more than most to rally people against the software patents directive in the European Parliament, has flagged up the next - and potentially even more serious - threat from software patents.

This time, though, it's couched in rather obscure terms. The battle is not about allowing software patents "as such" - since they are explicitly forbidden in Europe - but about how litigation over patents should proceed. The point is, if the current proposal for something called the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) goes through, the European patent offices, many of which are happily handing out software patents, would have enormous influence over the litigation of such questionable patents, which is hardly right, methinks. As Mueller explains:

The legal status of software patents in Europe is contradictory. While the existing written rules, which go back to the year 1973, disallow patents on computer programs “as such”, the European Patent Office (EPO) and various national patent offices have granted tens of thousands of software patents. However, European patents, even if granted by the EPO, can only be enforced country by country as of now, and national courts declare many EPO software patents invalid when their holders try to use them against alleged infringers. Critics argue that the EPLA would create a new court system that would be under the control of the same group of government officials who already govern the EPO, and that the judges appointed by those people would support the EPO’s granting practice and its broad scope of patentable subject-matter with respect to software and business methods.

It's still very early days for the EPLA, but fore-warned is fore-armed.

Moroccan Fisheries Escapes Proprietary Net

Not my title, I hasten to add (though I wish it had been), but the one used by this article. The latter does what it says on the tin - a sardine tin, I presume, since Essaouira is a major centre for fishing said species.

Croats Have a Go at...OSS Policy

It seems that Croatia has joined the Euro-club of OSS enthusiasts. At least that's what I'm told. I really must get around to learning Serbo-Croat....

Update: More details in English here (with thanks to James Tyrrell.)

Towards a Wikipedia Done Properly

Larry Sanger's name has cropped up several times on this blog, so I was delighted to interview him recently for The Guardian. You can read the finished result here. Larry rightly takes me to task for the misleading headline and sub-head, but in my own defence I have to point out that I didn't write them.

A Study in Official Openness

It is probably hard for those outside the UK to appreciate the extent of the secrecy that has pervaded public life here for centuries. The clearest manifestation of this is the pernicious Official Secrets Act, which makes pretty much anything a secret if the Government says it is.

Against this presumption that the public has no right to know anything, the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 2000 was a major milestone, and credit must be given to the current Government for finally making it a reality. This is especially the case since it is clear that the information released by Act is proving a major embarrassment at times, thanks to both an increasingly demanding public and a commendably independent commissioner, Richard Thomas.

As the foreword to his first Annual Report makes clear, he is acutely aware of the central position that his department occupies in today's world, where there is an inevitable tension between his two main tasks: promoting openness and protecting privacy:

Never before has the threat of intrusion to people’s privacy been such a risk. It is no wonder that the public now ranks protecting personal information as the third most important social concern. As technology develops in a globalised 24/7 culture, power increases to build comprehensive insights into daily lives. As internet shopping, smart card technology and joined-up e-government initiatives reduce costs, respond to customers’ demands and improve public services, more and more information is accumulated about us. According to one estimate, information about the average working adult is stored on some 700 databases. New information is added every day. Much of this will be confidential material which we do not want others to see or use unless we say so. There are obvious risks that information is matched with the wrong person or security is breached. The risks increase substantially as information is shared from one database to another, or access granted to another group of users. Real damage can arise when things go wrong – careers and personal relationships can be jeopardised by inaccurate information. Identity theft can involve substantial financial loss and loss of personal autonomy.

The vast majority of information that is held on adults, and increasingly on children, serves a useful purpose and is well intentioned. But everyone recognises that there must be limits. Data protection provides the framework. It raises questions about where lines should be drawn. What is acceptable and what is unacceptable? What safeguards are needed? What is the right balance between public protection and private life? How long, for example, should phone and internet traffic records be retained for access by police and intelligence services fighting terrorism? Whose DNA should be held, and for how long, to help solve crime? What safeguards are needed for commercial internet-based tracking services which leave no hiding place?

All power to Mr Thomas' elbow.

Of FAQs and NAQs

FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions - are one of the characteristic concepts of the online world, born, presumably, of a cheery belief that it is possible for experts to distill any given area into a few pithy questions and answers for the benefit of newbies.

But things are moving on. The Guardian has pioneered what it calls "Newly Asked Questions", and now we have a new kind of FAQ: "Frequently Awkward Questions", aimed at the entertainment industry. I imagine that others will follow in due course.

Why Microsoft Got Thwacked

If you were wondering what exactly the sticking point was that led to Microsoft getting thumped by the European Union, here's a helpful press release from the Free Software Foundation Europe. The central problem is the company's refusal to make documentation available that would allow GNU/Linux to interoperate perfectly with Windows, thanks to the Samba free software project:

"Microsoft is still as far from allowing competition as it was on the day of the original Commission ruling in 2004. All proposals made by Microsoft were deliberately exclusive of Samba, the major remaining competitor. In that light, the fines do not seem to come early, and they do not seem high," comments Carlo Piana, Milano based lawyer of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) regarding the decision of the European Commission to fine Microsoft 1.5 million Euro per day retroactively from 16. December 2005, totalling 280.5 million Euro. Should Microsoft not come into compliance until the end of July 2006, the daily fines could be doubled.

These fines are a reaction to Microsofts continued lack of compliance with the European Commission decision to make interoperability information available to competitors as a necessary precondition to allow fair competition.

Microsoft's refusal to comply - and its willingness to incur fines amounting to hundreds of millions of Euros - is a measure of just how worried it is about Samba in particular, and open source in general.

The release also points out how risible are Microsoft's claims that it cannot easily supply the requested information:

"If we are to believe Microsofts numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering," comments Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. "For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built."

Open Access...to Search Spam

Open access is usually about being able to read high-value texts that are normally only available for a correspondingly high fee. But, in reality, it's about access for free to stuff. For example, as Open Access News points out, you can have open access to "value-added" search spam data (and note the scrupulously precise use of the CC licence at the bottom).

OpenDocument Fellowship Rings the Changes

ODF just goes from strength to strength, as many posts on this blog attest. One of the main organisations pushing the standard is the splendidly-named OpenDocument Fellowship, even if it tends to keep a low profile (maybe it's just because I'm a member).

It has recently redesigned its Web site, and it's well worth taking a look for the useful ODF resources to be found there. These include introductions to the whole ODF idea, a handy list of applications that support ODF, the latest news and members' blogs with postings on related matters.

Of Sakai and Moodle

Sakai may not be a name that is known to many in the world of free software, but it's one of the leading open source projects in the field of education. IBM has certainly heard of it, having just donated a goodly lump of code to the project. And if Sakai proves of interest, you probably ought to check out Moodle, too.

The (Firefox) Fur Begins to Fly

As Firefox teeters on the brink of the first 2.0 beta, things are starting to get serious. No longer are we talking about a flash in the pan: Firefox is now a real, established rival to Internet Explorer, as these numbers from OneStat.com indicate.

Of course, there's a lot of variation in the degree to which Firefox has been adopted, from highs like Germany, with a stunning 39% using Firefox against 56% sticking with IE, to the snivelling Brits, of whom barely 11.5% use the Fox, while 86% cling to Uncle Bill.

The arrival of IE 7 will have an impact, but there's no doubt that Microsoft has left it far too late to roll back these kind of gains (even in the UK).

Wiki in the City

If you've ever wondered what might befall an innocent little wiki in hands of a serious investment bank, take a look at this. It's detailed, and the case studies are particularly interesting.

Open Access... as Haiku

If you don't have time to read through Peter Suber's full explanation of open access, you could always try his haiku version (this isn't new, but I've only just come across it). A sample:

I love print, paper.
But I love searching, linking,
using, sharing more.

...

They don't pay authors,
editors or referees.
Then they want the rights.

...

Sure, change copyright
and peer review. But OA
doesn't have to wait.

Apache Starts to Patch the Holes

The latest Netcraft survey shows that Apache has pulled back some of the ground it lost to Microsoft's Web server last month. There have been some pretty massive swings recently, as the oscillations in the graph show: these are largely due to switches in the hosting sector, which can often involve millions of Internet names at a stroke. For example, Go Daddy moved over 1.6 million hostnames from Apache to Microsoft's IIS platform in June.

These new gains for Apache are important, because it suggests that Microsoft's relentless campaign to "convince" hosting companies to switch to its products (and who wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall for those conversations?) may finally have run out of steam. It will be interesting to see what happens next month.

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.

DejaVu All Over Again: Open Source Fonts

Last month I commended Hakon Wium Lie's call for open source typefaces to replace the de facto standard based on Microsoft's fonts. And here's an interesting article about a project called DejaVu that might just do that. The piece has some interesting background information on both DejaVu and its predecessor, Vera.

Microsoft ODF Plugin Story Gets...Richer

When I wrote about Microsoft's announcement that it would be sponsoring a project to create an ODF plugin for its Office product, I said the story was big. But I was wrong: it's actually really big, because of a deeply ironic twist to the story, detailed on Groklaw:

It seems that when Microsoft was looking to build its new ODF plugin, it took a short cut. It seems to have grabbed some code from the OpenDocument Fellowship's program that converts ODF to HTML, written by J. David Eisenberg. His code is released under a dual license, the LGPL and the Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft has put it into its ODF plugin, which is licensed under the BSD license.

Is that allowed? It's nice Microsoft endorses the value of the ODF Fellowship code, since they are forever telling us their own code is better. But we're trying to parse out which license Microsoft thinks it is complying with. Not the LGPL, I trust. My question, and I'm no Apache guru, is what about Apache sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and maybe 4.4, plus the required form of notice in the Appendix? It's certainly possible I'm missing something. But it seems it may be Microsoft that neglected to notice some requirements.

A Straw in the Californian Wind?

Newspapers tend to keep their constituencies firmly in mind when they are writing. So you might expect the Los Angeles Times to be beating the drum for Hollywood fairly unthinkingly. And then up pops this editorial on various US proposals to give entertainment industries even more of a stranglehold over content, which concludes:

As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood.

Very interesting: if Hollywood's local newspaper is daring to write this, maybe a few other people in the vicinity are starting to think this way too. (Via TechDirt.)

It's a Dog's Life

One of the fascinating things that I learned when I was writing Digital Code of Life is that many diseases - such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, certain kinds of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders - are not commonly found in the great apes. As I put it then:

In a sense, the human genome has evolved certain advantageous characteristics so quickly that it has not been debugged properly. The major diseases afflicting humans are the outstanding faulty modules in genomic software that Nature was unable to fix in the time since humans evolved as a species.

Another extraordinary fact is that dogs are even more susceptible to these same diseases than humans are, and for the same reason: the domestic breeds have arisen so recently, and from limited populations through inbreeding. But if dogs are like us, only more so, then they also hold out the hope that by investigating the root causes of their afflictions we might be able to understand our own better.

I see that further steps in this direction are now being taken:

Melbourne researchers are examining the DNA of dogs in a research project aiming at determining the genetic causes of common pet diseases – and to provide a model for combating diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis in humans.

Malodorous Acacia

I've written about what promises to become the patent troll extraordinaire, but here's another, er, specimen. C|net introduces us to the head of Acacia Technologies Group, but don't be fooled by the name. Its patent-based business is anything but fragrant, despite what the interviewee might have you think:

It's the patent system that enabled people like Thomas Edison who actually developed the new technologies, which these companies then want to use to make money without paying for. The invention process is critical to the growth of the US economy and it's the smaller companies that usually come up with the new innovations and disruptive technologies that then the larger companies want to adopt. There's no one forcing them to add these features to their products. Obviously, they're doing it because they can make more money using the new features that were patented by someone else.

For a thoroughgoing refutation of this and other widespread misconceptions about patents and copyright, do read the brilliant Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, freely available from here. (Via TechDirt.)

The Smiley's Sad Tale

The smiley is a defining icon of the online generation. But as this article points out, it is also likely to go down as yet another enclosure of the virtual commons, a victim of insensate corporate greed, as companies battle it out for the "right" to claim this symbol as their "own".

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.)