Resolving the Free Content Licence Madness

Although the most famous example of free content is Wikipedia, it is unusual in that it uses the GNU Free Documentation Licence, rather than one of the better-known Creative Commons licences. And that's a problem, because it makes it hard to mix and match content from different projects.

One man well aware of this - not least because he is the cause of the problem, albeit unwittingly - is Larry Lessig. Heise Online have a good report covering what he said on the topic at the Wikimania conference:

"We need a layer like the TCP/IP layer which facilitates interoperability of content, allows content to move between ´equivalent´ licenses," Mr. Lessig declared, "where what we mean by equivalent is licenses where people mean the same thing. So the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is saying the same thing: Use my content however you want, to copy, to modify, as long as you give me attribution, as long as the modification is distributed under an equivalent license." The legal differences between the licenses should be bridged, he observed. The various types of licenses could compete with one another, thereby protecting against the weaknesses of any particular license, he stated.

As the two worlds of Wikipedia and CC content continue to grow, addressing this is becoming a matter of some urgency.

Crazy Like a Vixie

As I mentioned elsewhere, I did many interviews when I was writing Rebel Code. Very many. But one key person whom I just could not convince to talk to me was Paul Vixie, Mr BIND.

So when I saw that The Inquirer has instituted a new series of interviews called Internet Gods with none other than Mr V, my heart sank. And then rose.

Why ID Cards Are Stupid, Part 294

Because they can be cracked. So, in exactly how many ways does this scheme have to be found wanting before it is finally taken behind the shed and put out of its misery, Mr Blair?

Who's Afraid of a Terabyte?

So Google Research is offering to send anyone a trillion words - for free. But what does the ready availability of this kind of data deluge mean for the world? Here's what I wrote in an essay called "Digital reality", which appeared in a strange little book entitled Glanglish, back in 1989:

A few hundred years from now the world currency will be the Tera. Short for Terabyte, it represents a million million bytes of digital information. Roughly speaking this corresponds to half a million printed books. The data contained in a Tera will be arbitrary but meaningful: it will be the equivalent of a random selection of a twentieth of the British Library's present holdings. Within such a deluge there will be countless useful facts as well as countless useless ones. The sheer volume will ensure that there are enough of the former in every Tera to provide near parity in value with all other Teras of random structured information.

Surprisingly, a Tera is a small unit. A human being processes about two Teras every hour; multiply that by a world population of tens or hundreds of billions and you have millions of billions of new Teras every year. Add in the billions of computers and their information, as well as the countless billions of Teras from the past, and the quantity becomes unimaginable.

Billions of computers because by this time they will be ubiquitous. The basic models will be as small, cheap, and easy to use as a pen or pencil. Like pencils, they will be thrown away after a couple of uses. But where writing implements can be said only in a metaphorical sense to offer half a million English words or the ability to perform operations in calculus, the pen-sized computers will possess these skills literally, as well as providing myriad other functions.

But nobody will bother using them, any more than people use slide rules or log tables today. The real, state-of-the-art computers will be invisible. They will be the chair you sit in, the wall you lean against, the ground you walk on. The chair will not have a computer as such: it will be one. Or rather, every aspect of it - its shape, its colour, its position - will be the output from one.

Such environmental computers will no longer model reality through simulations: instead, they will offer an infinitely detailed alternative version that merges seamlessly into the old, physical variety. Potentially, every aspect of our world will be formed by computers capable of creating every experience.

Most people will be hooked on this drug of artificial, digital reality. Unlike the already addictive arcade games and television serials of today - which are flint tools in comparison to this future technology - digital reality will not just be a temporary substitute for real life, it will replace it totally, until the latter has no independent meaning. Like all junkies, digital addicts will habituate and constantly demand fresh stimulation in the form of new, manufactured experiences. To provide them, the billions of environmental computers must feed ravenously and unceasingly off the only source of experience's raw material, the Teras of structured data held around the planet. Their competing demands for a limited resource will valorise it; information will become society's most sought-after commodity, its invisible gold, its weightless coinage. Those that control that information, the data lords, will rule the world.

Looks like I was out by several orders of magnitude for both size and time-scale. But then they do say that making predictions is hard, especially about the future.

It's Top of the Wikimania Pops

And talking of Wikimania, if you're short of something to listen to on the beach, there's a bunch of fine MP3s just waiting to be downloaded on this wiki page, which brings together most of the speeches from the recent conference. There's also a few transcripts for those who prefer to mull over the words. (Via Open Access News.)

Of Wikiversity and Diversity

The world of Wikipedia goes from strength to strength. At the Wikimania conference, Jimmy Wales made several interesting announcements, including that of launching Wikiversity, a collection of wikified online courses. This is great news, but I can't help wondering whether it might not help talking to all the other open courseware projects out there. Diversity is all very well, but a little coordination never hurt anyone.

PLoS ONE: Plus and Minus

The good news: the innovative PLoS ON is now live. This should be interesting.

The bad news: its designers have gone bonkers, adopting a Laura Ashley colour scheme and a horrible selection of typefaces. Could we try again, please?

Foul Trademarks

As I wrote recently, I'm not keen on the term "pirates" being bandied about indiscriminately. That applies to things like "bio-piracy" and even the neologism "lingo-piracy":

We’ve heard about biopiracy, the practice of multinational corporations claiming patent rights in the genetic resources of plants and crops in a developing country. Now we are seeing the rise of what might be called lingo-piracy. Brazil is fed up with foreign companies claiming trademarks in common Brazilian words for native fruit, foods and plants. The trademarks give the foreign companies exclusive marketing rights in the words, which in turn inhibits Brazilians from selling their own native foods and fruit in foreign markets.

But I do agree we need a term for the concept so that it can be named and shamed whenever it is encountered. The central issue here is essentially bad trademarks; since we have "fair trade", perhaps we can introduce the concept of "foul trademarks" to cover the situation.

Open Access to Avian Flu Data: One Down

Terima kasih: Indonesia has agreed to provide open access to its avian flu data. Now all we need are for the other couple of dozen affected countries to do the same. (Via Open Access News.)

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.