A Mathematician Writes

One of the first things that children learn in maths is to do a quick check of their answers. Not quite sure if your calculation of 6.9574635 times 4.085647 is correct? Well, 7 times 4 is 28, so your answer really ought to be pretty close to that.

Common sense, right?

Wrong: Amazon says it's a brilliantly-novel idea that no one has ever had before in the history of the universe - and they have a patent to prove it. Words - and numbers - fail me. (Via Techdirt.)

Open Source Citizenship

There's a bit of a public ding-dong being conducted in the pages of some of the IT titles over what constitutes good open source citizenship.

Matt Asay kicked things off:

Aren't Yahoo! and Google missing the point or, rather, conveniently looking past it? Open source isn't about beneficent companies giving code to the impoverished underclass. It's about working on code collaboratively within a community.

To which Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny replied:

So let's suppose that we decided to release "what we can" into the open source world. Of course, there'd be a lot of legal vetting first. Code licensing is a real mine field, but let's suppose that we cleared that hurdle. It would look as if Yahoo was doing exactly what businesses looking to get into open source are told NOT to do: throwing some half-baked code "over the wall" and slapping a license on it.

But I think that both are being somewhat short-sighted.

Neither Google nor Yahoo is obliged to share their code, since they don't distribute it. They are perfectly entitled to keep it snug within their respective corporate firewalls. In any case, it's unlikely to be widely useful to other projects, so the gift would be large token. But the point is they do both benefit from open source, and it is therefore in their interest to support it as much as possible.

The solution is not to chuck code "over the wall", but rather to help open source in other ways. Google, to its credit, is already doing this, with its Summer of Code projects, its tie-up with Firefox and mostly recently its open source code repository.

As I've written before, Google's track record is not perfect, but it's certainly better than Yahoo's, which might try a little harder at being a good open source citizen in this respect. All it requires is a few high-profile grants to needy free software projects. How about it, Yahoo?

Why It's Called the 'Domesday Book'

The Domesday Book was William the Conqueror's list of swag that he won after the Battle of Hastings. You might, therefore, expect it to be called "Bill's Big Book of Booty" or some such Anglo-Norman equivalent. The actual name chosen is curious, but the explanation is straightforward.

"Domesday" - or "Doomsday" as we would write it - refers to the Last Judgement, the End of Time; and that, apparently, is when the British public is going to gain free access to one of the key documents in its history. The book has just gone online, but it costs an eye-popping £3.50 to see a page. Clearly the National Archives need to modify their tagline "Download your history..." to "Download your history...and pay through your nose for the privilege."

Open Source Oxymoron

For me Web TV is a contradiction in terms. The Web stands for intelligent interactivity, TV for dumb passivity. However, given that TV via the Internet is coming, whether I like it or not, better that it be open rather than closed source. And it looks like that's precisely what will happen. (Via LXer.)

Linus Does Not Scale

One of the darkest moments in the history of free software occurred in September 1998. For perhaps the first - and one hopes the last - time the Linux kernel came perilously close to forking.

The problem was simple: Linus had become a victim of Linux's success. He was unable to cope with the volume of patches that were being sent to him. In the memorable words of Larry McVoy at the time, "Linus does not scale."

That scaling problem was solved by working on a better version control system (what became BitMover, later replaced by the memorably-named Git), as wll as handing off some of Linus's work to others. In the case of the kernel, this could be achieved by mutual agreement, but more generally it is hard to divide up a task among many contributors.

There are now several sites that have sprung up to address this problem. One of them is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which I wrote about some time back, although I rather missed the key point, which is the use of distributed human intelligence to carry out those kind of tasks that computers presently struggle with. A more recent entrant is Mycroft, discussed in this C|net piece.

Also worth noting is the Crowdsourcing blog, which is a follow-up to the Wired article on the same (and doubtless a feeder to the inevitable book on the subject).

What's interesting about the crowdsourcing idea is that it represents a kind of open source without the openness: that is, participants are essentially computing drones with no way of knowing what the bigger picture is, unlike open source programmers, who can always look at the code. In a sense, then, crowdsourcing is a dilution of the idea at the heart of all the opens, but it's also a broadening in that it enfranchises more or less anybody with basic human processing abilities.

Update: And here's another crowdsourcing blog, called, aptly enough, Crowdsource.

Mashup Journalism

Open source journalism, also called citizen journalism, is nothing new, but I was intrigued to come across something called "SI journalism". This turns out to be re-using data gathered during the journalistic process to create mashups of one kind or another. The proposed name is "Structured Information Journalism", which has all the grace of a dodo in flight.

I'm not quite sure what it should be called - perhaps mashup journalism, which has a suitably tough, streetwise quality about it. Any other suggestions?

Open Sourcing Nanotechnology

I came to this extensive paper on open source and nanotechnology rather circuitously, via LXer and a posting from the Foresight Nanotech Institute. This could hardly be more appropriate: it was Christine Peterson, president of the Institute, who actually coined the term "open source" on 3 February 1998.

The paper is almost as old - it dates back to 2000 - but it is a measure of how forward-thinking it was that it still seems very current, what with its talk of licensing, patent pools and anti-commons. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

One of the somewhat counterintuitive arguments for open source is that it is safer than closed source. Reliability of complex systems, security against computer viruses and other attacks, and integrity of cryptographic secrecy in communications all benefit greatly from peer review and other key elements of open source development. These advantages may also apply to nanotechnology. Talking about open sourcing nanotechnology may evoke fears about giving easier access in the future to those who might abuse the technology. Both these issues make it important to discuss the relationship between open source and safety.

Which is a good point. Well-worth reading if you're at all interested in this fascinating if rather over-hyped field.

Not Your Father's Netscape Navigator

Web 2.0 sites like Digg are by the people, for the people: so can this quintessentially Diggness be bought? That's what Jason Calcanis is going to find out on the transmogrified Netscape Digg-alike site now that he has apparently snagged some Digg boys and girls to submit stories:

The word is getting out about the first 10 Netscape Navigators (people who took "the offer" to become paid bookmarkers). You can see their photos on the right hand column at www.netscape.com.

Here are the basic details, we hired:

1. Three of the top 12 DIGG users
2. The #1 user on Newsvine
3. The #1 user on Reddit
4. We hired a bunch of folks from Weblogs, Inc. (since we know and love them :-)

But as he himself points out:

It is important to note that this is all an experiment. No one knows for sure if this model of "paying people for work" us gonna work. I mean, it's crazy to think that people could be paid to do a job and do it with integrity--that's just crazy talk. :-)

Well, it's not so much the idea of paying people, Jason, that's the experiment; it's whether Digg's USP lies in the people submitting the stories or the ones doing the Digging.

Personally I think it's the latter - the community that builds up around a site; after all, people often submit the same story multiple times, so removing a few of the top (=fastest) posters will only slow things down slightly. But that's not to say that encouraging some defections to Netscape wasn't a shrewd move. It will certainly give the pages some meatier stories; the big question, though, is whether there are enough of the right people visiting Netscape who will bite.

Grokking Groklaw

I love interviewing people - which is a good job, since I did about 60 interviews when I wrote Rebel Code. Even today, I spend a lot of my time interviewing interesting people; of course, it's the "interesting" bit that's the hook.

I also like reading interviews - provided they are with similarly interesting people. Somebody who certainly falls into this category is Groklaw's Pamela Jones, who has done more than anyone to mobilise hoi polloi in the fight against SCO. As far as I can tell, she is rarely (if ever) interviewed, so kudos to Matthew Aslett for his recent Q & A session with her.

This is a Public Service Announcement

Well, you live and learn.

I'd been asking myself recently why my dinky Google ads down the right-hand side of this page had turned into ugly slabs of public service announcements (PSAs). Thanks to this article in the East Bay Express, I know why:

[I]n 2003, Google developed "sensitivity filters" to periodically scan the Web sites of its partners in search of violence, mature content, or other unacceptable material. "They detect sensitive content that we probably don't want to be showing advertising beside, and show public service announcements instead," says Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for trust and safety.

The concomitant loss of revenue worries me not a jot: basically, I earn enough per week from my Googly ads to buy myself a cup of coffee, if I'm lucky. What does worry me - as it does the original East Bay Express piece and Techdirt, is that it will have a stultifying effect on journalism, as titles and reporters avoid subjects that might trigger this advertising limbo.

Since I don't write much about violence or mature content, I must be pressing the "other unacceptable material" button - wicked things like criticising governments, large companies, existing and proposed legislation, that kind of stuff, I presume. Which means that PSAs on these pages are a badge of honour, a sign that I've hit home.

Don't Burn, Baby, Don't Burn

I have this vague feeling that I really ought to get excited about Rollyo, but for the life of me I can't think why I want to search a maximum of 25 sites: me, I like roaming through the odd billion, because you never know what you're going to find.

Nonetheless, this story on TechCrunch about Rollyo caught my eye for the following comment at the end:

The founder, Dave Pell, is a well known angel investor in Silicon Valley and could easily raise money for the company. But instead of looking for a large venture round of financing, he’s self funded Rollyo and has only one full time employee. By keeping the burn rate super-low, Rollyo can stay the course.

Absolutely, and I bet I know why he can keep that burn rate super-low: because he's running open source software - practically a given when it comes to Web 2.0 start-ups .

Meshing with Meshes

I don't know why, but I'm a bit of sucker when it comes to wireless meshes. So my curiosity was naturally piqued by Meraki. Based on an open source project, and named after an untranslatable Greek concept: what's not to like? (Via GigaOM.)

Will the US PTO Ever Learn?

Blackboard has announced

it has been issued a U.S. patent for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods. The patent covers core technology relating to certain systems and methods involved in offering online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-Learning systems.

That's putting it mildly. If you waste your life reading the summary, kindly placed online in a reader-friendly format by Michael Feldstein, you will find to your utter gob-smacked amazement that Blackboard has essentially been granted a patent on the idea of logging on to a Web server and accessing pages that contain educational materials:

The user is provided with a web page comprising a plurality of course hyperlinks, each of the course hyperlinks associated with each course that the user has been enrolled either as an instructor or as a student. Selection of a course hyperlink will provide the user with a web page associated with the selected course; the web page having content hyperlinks and buttons to various content areas associated with the course.

It's about as broad and utterly ridiculous as granting a patent for the idea of accessing a Web page with a "plurality" of links on any particular subject. (I know, I know - somebody has probably applied for this too.)

Fortunately, the broader a patent, the easier it is to find prior art to drive a stake through its black(board) heart. And Moodle - an open source course management system, which is obviously seriously threatened by this idiotic US PTO decision - has compiled a wonderfully detailed history of online learning. It not only puts the boot into Blackboard's pathetic claims, but provides a useful resource in itself. It ends its long, long list of prior examples of online learning with the laconic:

2006, July - Blackboard announces Patent 6,988,138

With this patent Blackboard seem to be claiming they invented everything above.

How many of these stupid decisions will it take before somebody sorts out the US PTO?

Up to a Certain Point

Ian Murdock, the semi-eponymous creator of Debian, has a nicely provocative post that turns some conventional wisdom on its head. It's often said - sometimes by me - that the move towards Web-based apps makes the operating system on a user's PC increasingly irrelevant, which means that people might as well opt for GNU/Linux instead of Windows. But as Murdoch points out:

Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the operating system is just a set of device drivers, wouldn’t you want the most extensive set? As far as Linux on the desktop has come in the past few years, it still lags Windows significantly in plug-and-play value.

I think he's right - up to a certain point. And that point is when GNU/Linux is good enough. You don't really need to have the absolutely spiffiest device drivers if the price you pay is lack of security and, well, price. We're not there yet, though, so maybe it would be a good idea to go easy on the device drivers argument for the moment....

Damascene Code

There's nothing quite like a Road to Damascus conversion when it comes to generating passionate advocates. Just as Saul the arch-oppressor became Saint Paul the arch-propagator, so Wind River, once the most vocal of GNU/Linux's opponents in the embedded space, has become one of its biggest supporters. Its latest move is the most dramatic: a donation of 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation.

What this shows is that the move to openness, however much born of desperation in the face of GNU/Linux's ineluctable rise in the embedded systems market, has clearly worked, and that Wind River is now a True Believer.

Commons versus Commons

An interesting reflection on the West's habit of stealing from one commons to create another - often with the best of intentions.

Wikipedia Cornucopia

You wait ages for a bus, and then three arrive at once. And so it seems for articles on Wikipedia. After I commended the piece in The New Yorker yesterday, here's an even better one in The Atlantic - home of the original "Memex" article by Vannevar Bush, which prefigured so much of the Web and Wikipedia.

The Atlantic's piece is particularly good on the origins and history of Wikipedia. Indeed, I had vaguely contemplated writing a book about Wikipedia and related open content projects to go alongside Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life, but there doesn't seem much point now with all this material available online.

And I liked this meditation on how Wikipedia functions:

Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

It also quotes the following striking idea:

[I]n June 2001, only six months after Wikipedia was founded, a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz made an arresting and remarkably forward-looking observation. The Internet, he mused, was nothing but a "global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility."

Now there's a thought.

Open Geodata Made Easy

If you've ever wondered what open geodata is and what it has to do with the other opens, try this introduction to the field. Along the way it mentions something called FLOSS Foundations, which I'd never heard of. Despite its name, it's not an organisation for dentists.

Foxed by Foxmarks

Mitch Kapor, he of software archaeology fame, has started a project called Foxmarks. According to the FAQ:

Foxmarks is an extension for Firefox that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple computers. Install Foxmarks on each machine that you want to keep synchronized, and Foxmarks will automatically propagate bookmarks changes that you make on one machine to all the others.

Hm: isn't this what Google Browser Sync does? And then some:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

But wait, Mitch says there's more:

I’m incubating a new startup, which is pretty exciting because we’re working on innovation at the intersection of search and social production. Think of new services which are a cross between Google and the Wikipedia.

BTW, Mitch, how is Chandler coming along? (Via C|net.)

Bio::Blogs #2...

...is now online. Not that I'm represented there or anything, oh my word, no. Well, only a bit. You might want to visit it anyway, since it comes all the way from sunny Brisbane.

The Quiet Revolution

One of the extraordinary things about Firefox is that its impact just keeps growing: the 200 million download mark has now been passed. Of course, this doesn't mean 200 million users, but the market share is also going up respectably.

This is all quite amazing - particularly because nobody seems to think it's amazing anymore. We expect it from Firefox, and that's good, because it helps seed the idea that open source in general should be aiming this high.

It's the Metric, Stupid

A great post by Stephen O'Grady pondering the likelihood or otherwise of billion-dollar open source companies appearing anytime soon. It contains a number of wise comments that make it well worth reading. For example:

So you look a little deeper and see that while open source might not (yet) create immense, monolithic wealth, it does benefit customers by lowering pricing and increasing choice. Further, it seems illogical to believe that even if open source can lower certain software acqusition and operating costs, those dollar savings are not invested elsewhere. How many CIOs will go their board and say "I invested in Linux, JBoss, & MySQL and saved us x dollars - please lower my budget accordingly"? You might also see that open source allows vendors to ammortize a number of traditional development, quality assurance and marketing costs, across a wide pool of volunteer resources, lowering the dollars they need to operate (you should hear Alfresco's Kevin Cochrane talk about the delta in saleperson costs - it's eye opening).

Quite. But I would go much further.

The reason we will probably never see a billion-dollar open source company is the fact that turnover is the wrong metric to focus on for such entities. Looking purely at income misses out on all the other kinds of value that are involved - for example, all the software that is downloaded and used by people who aren't paying customers. It excludes the value added to the open source ecosystem in terms of helping other free software projects, either directly through code re-use, or indirectly by promoting the overall concept.

These are all things that open source companies do routinely, and yet they receive next to no credit for it - financial or otherwise. It's part of a wider problem with current economics analyses that also typically don't take into account factors like environmental damage when estimating costs of production.

And at a deeper level still, there is something that O'Grady himself touches on:

Open source in many respects seems to underpin a future in which more people will make less, rather than less people making more. I know which I'd pick.

Focussing only on the money involved completely overlooks other crucial elements of free software: the social and ethical aspects. It's good to see that O'Grady is one of the people who gets this.

Update: Apparently, Matt Asay disagrees with O'Grady (and hence me).

Lies, Damned Lies and Baltimore Sun Op-Eds

This op-ed on net neutrality in the Baltimore Sun is extraordinary:

The "neutral" proposal that companies like Google are touting will ensure that they never have to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use, and consumers who may only use their computers to send e-mail and play Solitaire get to foot the bill.

Er, that is, companies like Google never have to pay a dime apart from the millions of dollars in connection fees that they cough up each year? Well, that's an interesting use of the word "never", as in "always".

I'd like to put this statement down to sheer stupidity, but, alas, I fear that it may be due to the fact that the authors are co-chairs of the "Hands Off the Internet" pressure group, which, by an amazing coincidence just happens to be funded by the big telco companies who are trying to kill net neutrality.

Pathetic. (Via TechDirt.)

We Are All Great Communicators Now

Tom Foremski has a thought-provoking post about the Internet's disruptive effects. More specifically, he asks: Where are they? His answer - that the real disruption is happening in the media sector - is a good one, but incomplete, I think.

He rightly observes that

every company is a media company to a greater or lesser degree. Because every company tells stories, it publishes to its customers, to its staff, to its new hires. We now have two-way media technologies and those that can adapt and master those technologies, and become technology-enabled media companies, will survive.

But this is not about publishing, which is essentially unidirectional (however much it may pay lip-service to the idea of listening to readers): it is about communication, which is truly two-way. And that is the key, disruptive effect of the Internet: it is forcing all companies to communicate with their customers - to speak and to listen - not just publish to them.

That is why so-called social networking lies at the heart of Web 2.0 technologies, and why integrating such egalitarian principles into their business is going to be so hard for most companies, given their natural penchant for a more seigneurial command and control approach.

The Politics of Knowledge and the Online Republic

Digital Universe's Larry Sanger has posted another of his thoughtful essays, this time on the central issue of the "politics of knowledge":

[T]he main arena of the new politics of knowledge is project governance. Wikipedia is famously unaccommodating of the usual privileges of experts; there is no special place them in Wikipedia-land. You might arrive at Slashdot possessed of the finest-tuned understanding of tech news, but when you join in making and rating comments, you become just another rank-and-file member until, perhaps, you prove yourself by the lights of Slashdot (which might or might not correspond to anything deserving the name “expertise”). On Digg, your vote counts the same as everybody else’s. And so forth.

So radical egalitarianism is built into the governance models of many collaborative projects. When, therefore, the Creative Public votes with their feet for Web 2.0 resources that reject the need of editors, such as Wikipedia, Digg, and MySpace (again, the latter may not be collaborative, but it’s definitely editor-free), they are thereby denying epistemic authority to the people who otherwise would be their editors.

Along the way, he introduces the idea of the "online republic":

Let me explain rather better what I mean by an “online Republic,” and then why I think that it is the only system that will have desirable epistemic consequences, in the long run. Bear in mind first that Republics have a definite democratic aspect, since power and authority in the project in actual practice (not just in the PR material) must emanate from the participants–not from the website owners. But not just anyone can count as a participant for voting purposes. Insofar as we are talking about an online polity that is shaped not by just anyone’s arbitrary whim but by “law,” there must be a process whereby someone becomes a member of the community and thus subject to its “laws.” In practical terms, this means no doubt that “full citizenship” must be earned through participation and through a declaration not to undermine at least the fundamental laws of the polity (i.e., engage in “insurrection”). The “fundamental laws” are essentially a community charter, which is carefully written, carefully interpreted, and, once established, very hard to change. The rule of law arguably requires a robust, well-respected constitution: if laws are very easy to change, legislators and judges can, with a flick of the pen, change the entire system into something else entirely. Finally, a Republic requires the free election of representatives, the basic qualifications of which (if any) are described by the charter, who both make and enforce the rules of the project.

His essay also has some handy links to other relevant materials, including this New Yorker feature on Wikipedia, currently the best overall introduction to the project and its history.