Java is something of a festering wound in the open source community. Simon Phipps has a nice piece about the "heroes of healing" who have tried to do something about this, as well as some background to Sun's current moves to make Java open source, in an as-yet undefined way.
Update: Matthew Aslett has some information about Phipps's latest thoughts on opening Java.
Darknet: it's got a lovely feel to it as you roll it around your mouth. But I wonder if it will leave a sour taste with governments around the world. The idea is bold:Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a "darknet". The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.
"There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet," says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. "If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void."
I wonder how long The Man will allow this sort of thing to continue before the full weight of international law, treaties et al. will be brought to bear upon the Swedish government to "do something about it".
Get it while you can.
As an old-timer going back well over a decade into the mists of Internet time, I recall shaking my head over some poor fool paying $7.5 million for the domain business.com; the argument was, if I recall correctly, that it would "obviously" become the single most important site for business. If you visit the site today, it is a totally anonymous business search engine that Alexa currently assigns the staggeringly high rank of 1,860. Well, that was a bargain, wasn't it?
But as they say, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and here we go again:John Gotts recently committed to purchasing Wiki.com for $2.86 million. Powered by MindTouch, Wiki.com provides further validation that wikis are moving into the mainstream. With its easily identifiable name, thousands of people are visiting the site daily without the aid of a search tool, signaling increasing interest in the technology and the value of a domain that drives natural traffic.
I don't think so, John. Still, look on the bright side: you could always sell the domain to Business.com. (Via TechCrunch.)
One of the great things about free software is that anyone can build on the work of others. For example, the Gecko engine lies at the heart of plenty of projects, from Firefox down, and it seems that someone else has joined the club.
Called K-Meleon (think about it - it only took my a 20 minutes to get it), it claims to be "an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform". Here are the screenshots.
At the moment it's hard to tell what purpose K-Meleon serves, but then the same could have been said about Firefox in the early days. Except that it was called Phoenix then - and note the interesting reference to another browser called, er, K-Meleon on this page. (Via Lxer.)
While Wikipedia seems always in the news (as the previous post indicates), the man who started it all - no, not Jimmy Wales, but Ward Cunningham - is surprisingly low profile. So it's always good to come across an interview with him. I found the following particularly interesting:The Creative Commons Attribution license is the "technology" we need to save patterns. If we'd known this 15 years ago we would not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Instead creative individuals would be retelling the patterns in a way that resonates with every developer while still preserving a thread back to the analysis that led to each pattern's initial expression.
Unfortunately, I don't really know what he means. God-talk, I suppose. (Via Creative Commons Blog.)
Larry Sanger has a useful round-up of stories that are mostly related to Wikipedia. Among them is one that I'd not seen. It's an in-depth investigation into the inconsistent way the Saudi authorities have been blocking Wikipedia. Obviously they find themselves in something of a quandary: there's lot of good content here that they would like to let users access, but there's also material that they are not so happy with.
It turns out that the article provides a solution to this problem:"The young generation is not fully aware or conscious of the smart tactics some Westerners use to convince people of their views about Islam," said Al-Gain. "It’s the KACST’s or the CITC’s responsibility to make these links accessible to scholars and Islamic educators so that they study, analyze and respond to them. In fact, the KACST or the CITC must alert Muslim scholars to the existence of such links for further research and examination to attack the devious misconceptions that offend Islam."
Admittedly, this is not the most positive way of putting things, but I think the underlying argument is right. In other words, the best defence against things that challenge your views is not to bury your head in the sand and hope that they will go away, but to confront the problem directly, and come up with a good defence.
Call it the innoculation strategy: you don't try to avoid catching something - which is probably impossible - but you do take the precaution of protecting yourself against its effects by training the immune system to deal with it.
One of the pleasures of blogging is the fact that no day is the same: the stories are always different, and the mix changes constantly. Well, usually, anyway. Yesterday I wrote a couple of stories that seemed to have repeated themselves slightly later.
The first, about Microsoft's "half-open" Windows Live Writer was echoed by news that it will be making a development kit for the Xbox 360 available to everyone, in what it claims will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry.
Of course, another big beneficiary is Microsoft, which gets more games, plus the commitment of end-users. But it's still interesting as a recognition of user-generated production as an important part of the equation.
The second story concerned the Honest Public Licence (HPL). And now here we have somebody who wants to modify the GNU GPL to forbid military use.
Again, however laudable the intentions here, I think it's misguided - even more than the HPL. First, it will be even harder to police: how are you going to find out if some top-secret army organisation is modifying the code but not releasing it? Worse, though, is the fact that it will simply discourage people from using open source at a time when the US military, for example, is increasingly adopting it.
Let's get the world using free software first, and address the niceties afterwards.
One reason why work is going on to produce version 3 of the GNU GPL is that things have moved on quite a bit since version 2 came out in 1991. For example, the idea of providing software as a service across the Internet was in no one's mind at that time.
Today, of course, it's the backbone of companies like Yahoo and Google, and therein lies the problem. As I've written about elsewhere, the issue is that they use a lot of free software to provide those services, but give relatively little back to the communities that write it.
Now, in this they are (currently) quite within their rights, since they are not distributing any code based on free software, which is the trigger for making it open. But the larger issue is whether they should be distributing it anyway.
Someone who thinks they should is Fabrizio Capobianco. And he's come up with what he believes is a solution: the splendidly-named Honest Public License (HPL). As Capobianco explains:The goal of HPL is to keep the community honest with itself. The use of the name "Honest" is ABSOLUTELY not intended to mean that GPL or any other licenses are dishonest. It is quite the opposite, actually. But some people are taking advantage of a GPL legal loophole and are defeating the spirit of the GPL. HPL is just GPL extended to cover the distribution of software as a service to the public. It does not take away any freedom (i.e. you can use it internally in your corporation), it just covers when someone distributes the code to the public (whether with a floppy or as a service). It is meant to keep people honest with their community.
I think this is a laudable attempt - laudable, but misguided. The last thing we need is another open source licence. In fact the plethora of licences is one of the banes of the free software world. Adding one more - however well intentioned - is only going to make things worse.
There are also practical objections. For example, releasing code under the HPL will discourage companies from using it; or they may use it and fail to open up their code, in which case it will be hard to discover that they are in breach.
I think a better solution is to get GNU GPL 3 right, and let companies that offer software as a service based on open source do the right thing. After all, as I suggested in my Linux Journal column, enormous amounts of goodwill can be generated by giving more than the licence requires, and such a development would be far better for the free software world than burdening it with yet another licence. (Via NewsForge.)
Things are getting interesting on the enterprise distro front. The two front-runners, Red Hat and SuSE are being joined by a couple of newcomers. Well, Debian is hardly a newcomer, since it was one of the earliest distributions, but it's not well known as an enterprise system. That may change with HP's announcement that it will offer Debian support.
The other one, in case you were wondering, is Ubuntu, which is also coming through strongly, not least thanks to Sun's increasing interest. Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)
Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, which allows you to post to blogs directly from a WYSIWYG desktop app, is hardly open in the traditional sense, although it is free. However, it's half-open in the sense that it supports non-Microsoft blogs like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress.
I've not been able to try it, because it requires the .Net framework which I prefer not to have on my Windows boxes since it's huge and really just adds to the software spaghetti. But credit where credit is due: Microsoft is slowly getting the hang of this openness lark. (Via Ars Technica.)
I wouldn't normally write about software designed for the world of film and TV industries, but this seems pretty noteworthy. Celtx (pronounced "keltix") providesthe film, TV, theatre, and new media industries with an Internet compliant tool for writing, managing and producing media content.
The film and TV industries traditionally use large binders filled with paper and taped-in Polaroid pictures to manage the production of movies and television shows. "It is incredible how little attention has been paid to the pre-production end of the business.", Celtx co-founder and company CEO Mark Kennedy stated. "Lots of time and effort have been spent introducing digital technologies to the production and post-production phases - digital cameras, digital film and sound editing, CGI software - but nothing to help those working in pre-production. Celtx is the first application to do so.
It is, of course, open source (or I wouldn't be writing about it), and is apparently based on Firefox, which is pretty amazing given the complexity of the program that has been developed as a result. It is also cross-platform and available in many localised versions. It comes from a company located in Newfoundland, about which I know nothing other than that they have laudably outrageous ambitions.
What might seem an incredibly specialised piece of code is, I think, of broader significance, for several reasons. First, it shows how the open source approach of building on what has been done before - Firefox in this case - allows even small companies to produce complex and exciting software without needing to make huge upfront investments other than that of their own ingenuity.
It also demonstrates how far free software has moved beyond both basic infrastructural programs like Linux and Apache and mainstream apps like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. As such, Celtx is a perfect example of what might be called third-generation open source - and definitely a story worth following closely. (Via NewsForge.)
Against Intel's clueful release of open source drivers for its graphics chips, the following statement from ATI is, well, extraordinary:"Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source," the company said in a statement.
Presumably, this would be the same kind of "value" that handcuffs add.
Choose free software, and keep the Five Precepts. (Via LXer.)
If you've ever wondered how spare electromagnetic spectrum can be used to form a commons, here's a good explanation of the issues in the US. It even mentions Armenia's greatest contribution to the field. (Via OnTheCommons.org.)
We live in an ordered universe. Or rather, we would like to believe we do. And even if we don't, we try as hard as we can to make it ordered. You only have to look, on the one hand, at Wikipedia, which is nothing less than an attempt to create a systematic collection of human knowledge, or, on the other, at Flickr groups, each which views the collection through the often obsessive prism of its defining principle.
So it comes as no surprise to find that there is a Web site that aims to combine a whiff of Wikipedia with a flash of Flickr. It's called The Visual Dictionary, and it is interested not so much in words as containers of meaning, but as pure visual symbols. It's still quite small, but strangely pleasing. (Via Digg.)
There are already lots of good reasons to use Firefox - the fact that it is more stable, more compliant with Web standards and just more fun to use. But add one more: according to this report, Firefox code is now being vetted for bugs automatically:The company has licensed Coverity's Prevent to scan the source code of the browser and help detect flaws in the software before its release, Ben Chelf, chief technology officer at Coverity said Thursday. Coverity and Mozilla plan to jointly announce the arrangement on Monday, he said.
Even though the announcement isn't coming until Monday, Mozilla actually licensed the Coverity tool about a year and a half ago, Chelf said. The companies held off on the announcement until Mozilla felt comfortable with the product and it actually yielded some results, he said.
A year and a half ago? Now that's what I call circumspection.
...or are you just glad to see me?
This is hardly rocket science, but it's nonetheless potentially highly useful. Apparently the German company Sevenval has stripped Wikipedia down to its bare essentials, making it suitable for access via a mobile phone.
The end-result is rather attractive even in a standard browser, but its real importance is that it puts a large chunk of human knowledge (albeit with some dodgy bits) at your disposal wherever your mobile can hook up to the Internet. (Via Openpedia.org.)
One of the long-held dreams of computer science is to create systems that "understand" the world in some sense. That is, they can respond to questions about a knowledge domain and produce answers that aren't simply restatements of existing information. Or as Cycorp, probably the leading company in this field, puts it slightly more technically in describing its main product:
The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. Cycorp's goal is to break the "software brittleness bottleneck" once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic "common sense" knowledge--a semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations--that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. Cyc is intended to provide a "deep" layer of understanding that can be used by other programs to make them more flexible.
If this is your kind of thing, the good news is that there is an open source version called OpenCyc. The president of the associated non-profit Cyc Foundation has an explanation of what the software does that is slightly more user-friendly than the one above:Foundation president, John De Oliveira, compared the Foundation's "Cyclify" effort to the Wikipedia project. He said, "The Wikimedia Foundation asks us to 'Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.' In the Cyclify project, led by The Cyc Foundation, we ask you to imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to programs that reason with the sum of all human knowledge."
(Via Slashdot.)
Here's a hopeful analysis. It concerns the pernicious Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which is often used by Western nations to force other countries to pass harsh laws that control intellectual monopolies.
The piece claims that TRIPS was accepted by developing countries as a quid pro quo for obtaining fairer treatment for their agricultural goods. But the recent collapse of the so-called Doha round of trade negotiations means that such fairer treatment is unlikely to be forthcoming. So, the logic runs, maybe developing countries should give TRIPS the heave-ho in return. Interesting.
Say "Wikipedia", and you probably think of an almost ungraspable quantity of undifferentiated text, but it's much more than that. A good way to appreciate its manifold glory is to take a close look at the Wikimania Awards Finalists page. Me, I'd vote for the diagram showing Han foreign relations and the animation of the Geneva Mechanism. (Via Lessig Blog.)
You don't have to be Nostradamus to predict that Ubuntu is well on the way to joining the front rank of distros, along with Red Hat and SuSE. By that I mean not just that it is popular - as the Distrowatch rankings already show - but that it is, or will be, fully capable of satisfying enterprise users too. In part this is a technical issue, but it's also cultural too: Ubuntu is consistently one of the most interesting in terms of how it is approaching the whole process of creating a distribution.
The latest proof of this is the appointment of a "community manager". As Ubuntu's founder and main sponsor Mark Shuttleworth explains, this post is"uniquely Ubuntu" in that it brings together professional management with community integration. This job has been created to help the huge Ubuntu community gain traction, creating structure where appropriate, identifying the folks who are making the best and most consistent contributions and empowering them to get more of their visions, ideas and aspirations delivered as part of Ubuntu - release by release.
It’s unusual in that it’s a community position that is not an advocacy position. It’s a management position. Our community in Ubuntu is amazingly professional in its aspirations - folks want to participate in every aspect of the distribution, from marketing to artwork to sounds to governance and beyond. And we welcome that because it means we share the ownership of the project with a remarkably diverse and mature team. In the past six months I’ve noticed a number of people joining and having an impact who are mature professionals with great day jobs and a limited ability to contribute in terms of time - but a strong desire to be part of “this phenomenon called Ubuntu”. The job of the community manager will be to make it possible for these folks to have an amplified impact despite having time constraints on their ability to participate.
The job has been given to fellow Brit Jono Bacon, and I wish him well in what sounds like an interesting challenge. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)
I've written elsewhere about the stunning rise of Eclipse. The news that IBM, the original donor of code, has given some more software to the project, this time in the field of healthcare, is notable. It shows that what began as a rather specific tool for Java programmers is now turning into a general platform. I predict that Eclipse will one day be the main such platform for every kind of development project, whatever the domain. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)
Lars Wirzenius is not as well known a he should be, for he more than anyone was both witness and midwife to the birth of Linux. Along the way, he garnered an interesting tale or two about that young chap Linus, his fellow student at Helsinki University. Some of these he kindly passed on to me when I was writing Rebel Code.
I'll never forget the interview, because it was conducted as he was walking along, somewhere in Helsinki, and somewhat breathlessly. The sense of movement I received down the line was quite a physically disconcerting experience.
This memory flooded back to me when I came across this link on OSNews about Lars' current project. As his "log" - not "blog" - explains:I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in the installation experience.
To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine, and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new computer.
Of course: why hasn't this been done more often? It's precisely what the GNU/Linux community needs to know to make things better. Reviews by journalists are all very well, but you can't beat in-depth, long-term end-user experience. Wizard idea.
So the open IP telephony company Digium scores $13.8 million in VC dosh. Yawn.
What's most amazing about this announcement is how extraordinarily boring it is. Digium was obviously well placed to get VC money, because it's already a huge success. Investing in it is a complete no-brainer (lucky Matrix that somehow convinced it to accept). And all this sheer and utter boringness is yet another measure of how successful open source has become. Of course it gets VC money, of course it's profitable, of course it will wipe out the opposition.
Next question?
One of the reasons it took a while for people to accept free software is that there is a traditional diffidence in the face of things that are free. After all, if something's free, it can't be worth anything, can it? The same infuriating obtuseness can be seen writ large when it comes to the environment: since the air and sea are all free, they can't be valuable, so polluting them isn't be a problem.
Against this background, it is no wonder that traditional economics pays scant regard to the value of the environment, and rarely factors in the damage caused to it by economic activities. It is also signficant that the seminal work on valuing all of Nature goes back to 1997, when Robert Costanza and his co-authors put the worth of the planet's annual contribution to mankind at a cool $33 trillion per year, almost certainly an underestimate.
So it's high time that this work was updated and expanded, and it's good to see that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is providing some much-needed money to do precisely that:Over the next year, with an $813,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Costanza and his team will create a set of computer models and tools that will give a sophisticated portrait of the ecosystem dynamics and value for any spot on earth.
"Land use planners, county commissioners, investment bankers, anyone who is interested," Cosntanza said, "will be able to go on the Web, use our new models, and be able to identify a territory and start getting answers."
For example, if a town council is trying decide the value of a wetland--compared to, say, building a shopping mall there--these models will help them put a dollar value on it. If a country wants to emulate Costa Rica's program of payments to landowners to maintain their land as a forest, they'll better be able to figure the ecosystem value of various land parcels to establish fair payments.
This is a critically-important project: let's hope its results are widely applied, and that we can use it as a step towards paying back the debt we owe Nature before it - and we - go environmentally bankrupt. (Via Digg.)
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