ODF a Standard in Malaysia?

The word is spreading: it seems that ODF is likely to become a standard in Malaysia, too. (Via Bob Sutor's Blog.)

Trouble at 't Mill

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the sticky stuff that holds the Web together; without it, the whole caboodle would slowly come unstuck, fraying into lots of proprietary strands.

So this kind of posting, which seems to indicate problems at the heart of the W3C, is deeply worrying:

I believe for our society to progress it's essential that our culture, our knowledge, and our society itself are as accessible as possible to everyone; web standards are how we choose to achieve this on the World Wide Web, and for us to communicate, especially if we have special needs or novel ideas about information access, it depends on compliance to web standards. With this in mind I became interested in assuring standards compliance on the Web and involved in the development of tools meant to help in this respect at the World Wide Web Consortium seven years ago.

I now have to discontinue my participation in this area at the W3C and would like to explain how the World Wide Web Consortium failed to provide what I think would have been and still is necessary to advance the tools and services to an acceptable level, which will explain why I am leaving now.

(Via Slashdot.)

OOo-La-La!

An interesting report from the French Ministry of Defence, that OpenOffice.org may have neglected some security issues in its headlong rush to achieve parity with Microsoft Office. The problem seems to lie with macros, and frankly, I'm not surprised. I never use them, and I really think that anyone who does is asking for trouble. A word processor is for, you know, processing words; it does not need to pass the Turing Test.

Still, this is the kind of stuff that's easily fixed with the odd huge window marked "Danger: do not run this macro" every five seconds. (Via in Ars Technica.)

From Elephant's Dream to Boy Who Never Slept

What makes a film open source? I've written before about Elephant's Dream, which is open source in the sense you can download all the Blender files that go to make it up. And now there's this:

Boy Who Never Slept is a free full length movie that anyone can watch, share, and even use in their own derivative works (open source).BWNS is about an insomniac writer and his relationship with a teenage girl he meets online. What begins as merely a friendship, evolves into an unlikely love wrapped in harsh reality..

There's a more thoughtful explanation, too:

In this sense an open source movie refers to finished video content released with a derivative license along with the "source" or original files used to create the finished video, are released with a derivative license as well. This allows a lot more ability for new artists to edit, remix, and evolve the original work.

Other items that may or may not be released along with the video content include the script or screenplay, the soundtrack, and the sound effects.

These source files are available here. (Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)

World (Wide Web) War 2.0

One noticeable effect of blogs is that they can bring out the worst in people. In part, this is the email problem of being unable to judge tone writ large. But it also seems to be the case that the sheer ease-of-use of the medium encourages all kinds of loonies to creep out of the woodwork. Religious wars on the relative merits of free software and open source are quite mild compared to no-holds-barred attitude among the political blogs, which seem to polarise writers and readers alike.

That's why I tend to avoid sites like the one this appeared on, but as you will see from the post in question, something interesting is about to happen: the self-professed "lizardoids" are about to take on the "moonbats" in the Web 2.0 arena. What this means in practice is that there are going to be huge battles for the soul of Digg, with lots of marking up and down.

It might be quite entertaining, but it certainly won't be pretty. (Via BGSL.)

The Mega-Important MicroRNAs

Yesterday, when I was writing about the structures found in DNA, I said

Between the genes lie stretches of the main program that calls the subroutines

This is, of course, a gross over-simplification. One of the most interesting discoveries of recent years is that between your common or garden genes there are other structures that do not code for proteins, but for strings of RNA. It turns out that the latter play crucial roles in many biological processes, for example development. Indeed, they are fast emerging as one of genomics' superstars.

So it is only right that Nature Genetics should devote an entire issue to the subject; even better, it's freely available until August 2006. So get downloading now. Admittedly, microRNAs aren't the lightest of subject-matters, but they're mega-important.

Last Night a DVD Saved My Life

Last night, my Windows 2000 box died. To be fair, it was nothing to do with Windows, but a dodgy hard disc. And yes, of course I have backups...it's just that they're not entirely up-to-date, and missing even a few days' data is a pain. I could re-install Windows and hope that gave me access to my data (stored on a separate partition), but this would take a few hours that I don't have, and might not work. Luckily there's a better way.

Booting up the PC with the Knoppix 5.0 Live DVD inside produced not only a working machine in a couple of minutes, with access to all of my data, but a cool 5000 programs at my beck and call. Including K3b, which meant that I could simply burn copies of the data I was missing. Problem solved.

Thanks, Knoppix: you're a gent.

The Personal Genome Part 265

Here's Nick Wade reviewing candidate technologies for the sub-$1000 genome. It's coming, people.

The Future of Media

The Future of Media Report has two main things going for it. First, it comes from an Australian group, which gives it a slightly different perspective on things. Secondly, it is packed full of interesting graphs and charts. Make that three: it's available under a liberal CC licence.

If Not Net Neutrality - What?

That old contrarian curmudgeon, Andrew Orlowski, has found a soul-mate in Richard Bennett: "[t]he veteran engineer played a role in the design of the internet we use today, and helped shaped Wi-Fi" as Orlowski explains before an interview. In addition,

Bennett argues that the measures proposed to 'save' the internet, which in many cases are sincerely held, could hasten its demise. Network congestion is familiar to anyone's whose left a BitTorrent client running at home, and it's the popularity of such new applications that makes better network management an imperative if we expect VoIP to work well. The problem, he says, is that many of the drafts proposed to ensure 'Net Neutrality' would prohibit such network management, and leave VoIP and video struggling.

The conversation that follows is extremely interesting, and certainly hits home. But I have big problems with this part:

They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank - to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else's. But it's not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it's technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.

These all seems very weak arguments in against net neutrality; I'd rather err on the side of hippy edge-to-edge goodness.

TOPAZ Tarnished

I've written approvingly of PLoS ONE before, and it's also good to see that the underlying software platform will be open source. But I was disappointed to read this post calling for some "help to shape the future":

Now is your chance to get very actively involved in the creation of TOPAZ, the new Open Source publishing platform which PLoS is involved in developing and which will be supporting PLoS ONE when it launches. What we need is some people in the San Francisco area who would be willing to be on a focus group to give us some advice on the feel and functionality that you would like to see. It is a great project and we really do want your views.

Surely a global perspective is absolutely critical to what PLoS ONE is trying to achieve? So limiting focus groups to a very particular part of the anglophone world seems foolish, to say the least.

And it's not as if there aren't other ways that this could be done, taking input from all around the world. For example, I've heard this thing called "The Internet" can be quite handy in these circumstances....

The Other GNU/Linux

Think of GNU/Linux and you probably think of servers, maybe with a smidgeon of desktop thrown in for good measure. In fact, the domain where GNU/Linux utterly dominates is that of high-performance computing.

But it may be that GNU/Linux's finest hour is yet to come - as a mobile phone operating system. After all, it is likely that there will be a mobile phone for most people on this planet one day, but the same cannot be said about conventional PCs.

So news stories like this one, about the doubling of membership of a GNU/Linux phone standards group, are actually rather important.

But dull.

Theses Unbound

OK, I admit it: I chose this for the title again. Well, "consultation on a national e-theses service for the UK" isn't quite so exciting.

The Internet? It's a Series of (You)Tubes

Is it just me, or has the entire VC industry gone utterly bonkers over Internet video? It seems that every day there's a new YouTube me-too launch on TechCrunch - with the usual "I think it's got potential" that seems to accompany every such story - and now, thanks to IP Democracy, we have a neat little table that suggests that VCs are, indeed, barking:

we take a look at the amount of venture money that has flowed into IP video start-ups over the past year and find that over $600 million has been invested in the YouTubes and Sling Medias and MobiTVs of the world since around this time last year. Our list (see table below) doesn’t even include investments for web sites or technology companies that focus a lot — but not primarily — on IP video efforts.

I realise that the Internet is a series of tubes, but as far as video is concerned, things really seem to be going down them.

EU Parliament Gets a Touch of the Opens

Blige, serious goings-on in the EU parliament. In a text recently adopted, it

18. Takes note of the Commissions' view that the EU must acquire a cost-effective, legally watertight and user-friendly system of intellectual property protection so as to attract technologically advanced companies; considers that the protection of intellectual property must not interfere with open access to public goods and public knowledge; urges the Commission to promote a socially inclusive knowledge-based society by supporting, for example, free and open source software and licensing concepts like the General Public License (GPL) and the Public Documentation Licence (PDL);

This is a gauntlet thrown down to the European Commission, particularly Microsoft's friend, Mr McCreevy. I wonder what will happen next. (Via Heise Online.)

Open Source is Better - Ask a Virus Writer

Virus writers are not known for their morals - or for being fanboys: they will use whatever means necessary to achieve their dubious ends. So when MacAfee warns that

Malicious-software writers are increasingly using open-source methodologies when developing their code

you can be pretty sure that this follows an extremely objective evaluation of the various competing development methods.

Maybe not quite the testimonial most free software enthusiasts were looking for, but a testimonial nonetheless.

The World's First Open Source Man

The genome – the totality of DNA found in practically every cell in our body - is a kind of computer program, stored on 23 pairs of biological DVDs, called chromosomes. Within each chromosome, there are thousands of special sub-routines known as genes. Between the genes lie stretches of the main program that calls the subroutines, as well as spacing elements to make the code more legible, and non-functional comments – doubtless deeply cool when they were first written – that have by now lost all their meaning for us.

DNA's digital code – written not in binary, but quaternary (usually represented by the initials of the four chemicals that store it: A, C, G and T) – is run in a wide range of cellular computers, using a central processing unit (known as a ribosome), and with various initial values and time-dependent inputs supplied in a special format, as proteins. The cell computer produces similarly-formatted outputs, which may act on both itself and other cells.

Thanks to a far-sighted agreement known as the Bermuda Principles, the digital code that lies at the heart of life is freely available from three main databases: one each in the US, UK and Japan. As a result, the DNA that was obtained through the Human Genome Project is open source's greatest triumph.

But so far, no human genome can be said to represent any single human being: that of the Human Genome Project is in fact a composite, made up of a couple of dozen anonymous donors. But soon, all that will change; for the first time, the complete genome of a single person will be placed in the public databases for anyone to download and to use, creating in effect the world's first open source man.

His name is Craig Venter, and for nearly two decades he has been simultaneously revered and reviled as one of the most innovative researchers in the world of genomics. He was the person behind the company Celera that sought to sequence the human genome before the public Human Genome Project, with the aim of patenting as much of it as possible. Fortunately, the Human Genome Project managed to stitch together the thousands of DNA fragments it had analysed – not least thanks to some serious hardware running GNU/Linux – and to put its own human genome in the public domain, thus thwarting Celera's plans to make it proprietary.

A nice twist to this story is that it turned out that Celera's DNA sequence was not, as originally claimed, another composite, but came almost entirely from one person: Craig Venter himself. So his latest project is in many ways simply the completion of this earlier attempt to become the first human with a fully-sequenced genome. The difference now, though, it that it will be in the public databases, and hence accessible by anyone.

This will have profound consequences. Aside from placing his DNA fingerprint out in the open – which will certainly be handy for any police forces that wish to investigate Venter – it means that anyone can analyse his DNA for anything. At the very least, scientists will be able to carry out tests for genetic pre-dispositions to all kinds of common and not-so-common diseases.

So it might happen that a laboratory somewhere discovers that Venter is carrying a genetic variant that has potentially serious health implications. Most of us will be able to choose whether to take such tests and hence whether to know the results, which is just as well. In the case of incurable diseases, for example, the knowledge that there is a high probability – perhaps even certainty – that you will succumb at some point in the future is not very useful unless there is a cure or at least a treatment available. Venter no longer has that choice. Whether he wants it or not, others can carry out the test and announce the result; since Venter is a scientific celebrity and a public figure, he is bound to get to hear about it one way or another.

So while his decision to sequence his genome might be seen as the ultimate act of egotism, by choosing to publish the result he will in fact be providing science with a wonderfully rich resource - the complete code of his life - and at some considerable risk, if only psychological, to himself.

The Dangers of Open Content

Here's a nice story involving Elephant's Dream and Wikipedia - and a reminder that the latter is best regarded as a rough guide or a starting point, to be used with intelligence, not instead of it. (Via Slashdot.)

More Microsoftie FUD

Another comparative "analysis" of security flaws in Windows and Red Hat. The result: Windows is better - the figures prove it. Well, yes, but let's look at those figures at little more. The giveaway is this paragraph:

Because of the nature of the Open Source model, there seems to be a higher tendency (unscientificly speaking) to just copy a piece of code and reuse it in another components. This means that if a piece of code turns out to be flawed, not only must it be fixed, but also that maintainers must find every place they might've reused that blob of code. A visual inspection showed me that many of these were the multiple vulnerabilities affecting firefox, mozilla and thunderbird. In a typical example, firefox packages were fixed, then mozilla packages were fixed 4 days later, then thunderbird was fixed 4 days after that.

Note that it says "In a typical example, firefox packages were fixed, then mozilla packages were fixed 4 days later". So one reason why Red Hat has more vulnerabilities is that it has far more packages included, many of which duplicate functions - like Firefox and Mozilla. The point is, you wouldn't install both Firefox and Mozilla: you'd choose one. So there's only one vulnerability that should be counted. Not only that, but Red Hat is penalised because it actually offers much more than Windows.

I don't know what the other vulnerabilities were, but I'd guess they involved similar over-counting - either through duplication, or simply because Red Hat offered extra packages. By all means compare Windows and Red Hat, but make it a fair comparison.

Wikipeda Does RSS

I amazed this hasn't been done before: you can now track changes to Wikipedia articles through an RSS feed. If you use Firefox, say, to go to the history tab of the page that interests you, you'll find the standard orange radio symbol in the address bar like any other RSS feed.

This is clearly great, because it means that you can watch how pages of interest to you change; it's also clearly terrible, because it means that edit war loonies will be able to engage even more rapidly. (Via Micro Persuasion.)

The Value of the Public Domain

More light reading - this time about the public domain. Or rather, a little beyond the traditional public domain, as the author Rufus Pollock states:

Traditionally, the public domain has been defined as the set of intellectual works that can be copied, used and reused without restriction of any kind. For the purposes of this essay I wish to widen this a little and make the public domain synonymous with ‘open’ knowledge, that is, all ideas and information that can be freely used, redistributed and reused. The word ‘freely’ must be loosely interpreted – for example the requirement of attribution or even that derivative works be re-shared, does not render a work unfree.

It's quite academic in tone, but has some useful references (even if it misses out a crucial one - not that I'm bitter...).

Innovation Happens Elsewhere - Online, Too

Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel have made available an online version of their book Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy. It's a well-written and highly-approachable introduction to open source, mainly for those thinking about using free software in business.

I particularly like the following take:

Open source is fundamentally about people volunteering to work on projects in what could be called the commons; that is, it is about working on things for the public good.

This idea will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but it's still a novel viewpoint for many. The rest of the book shows a similarly refreshing originality in its approach. (Via Creative Commons blog.)

Net Neutrality and Open Spectrum

David Levine has an interesting post that joins the dots connecting the net neutrality debate with the issue of creating a spectrum commons. I don't share his concerns about imposing net neutrality through legislation, but I certainly agree that breaking the last mile monopoly through wireless is ultimately a better solution. And while we're at it, let's try and get some global wireless meshes going too.

ODF A.G. (After Google)

It's curious the low-key way that Google has joined the ODF Alliance. But there's no mistaking the impact and importance of that move. IBM's Bob Sutor has some interesting observations in this context. Two in particular:

It is up to Google to say what they want about this, but, as I noted last night, ODF Alliance membership jumped by 20 members in the few days following the news of their membership.

and

OpenDocument is bringing on a Renaissance of document creation and publishing. That which we used to know is being rediscovered and combined (mashed together) with what we have learned recently.

The orthodoxy of "this is how you create office documents" is going to fall by the wayside, though there will opposing kingdoms and battles and heretics and maybe even a few heros emerging.

Tripped up for Want of a Commons

I'm not a poddie myself, but the idea behind Griffin Technology's iTrip - being able to broadcast your MP3 files to nearby FM radios - is a great one. A pity, then, that's it's currently against the law in the UK because it "trespasses" on someone else's "property" - the radio spectrum that has been allocated for their use.

The current fix, apparently, is to use the 2003 Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) Regulations Act. But the real solution is to create a much broader spectrum commons where people can start trying out all sorts of wireless innovation - without having to jump through these kind of hoops.

Update: Wow, that was quick. Here's Ofcom with a consultation on Wireless Telegraphy Licence Exemption that amends the 2003 Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) Regulations Act. Powerful things, these blogs. (Via openspectrum.info.)