Monty Python's Flying IDE

The last time I programmed was in Fortran, about 25 years ago. The machine I was using had 2 megabytes of memory - not RAM, but "core": it was an IBM 360, as I recall. I've often thought maybe I should learn a slightly more up-to-date language, and Python has always attracted me.

First, because of the name: I grew up on watching Monty Python when it first came out, and it has shaped my entire Weltanschauung; secondly, because I had the pleasure of interviewing Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, who is a thoroughly nice chap; and thirdly, because the consensus seems to be it's a fine language.

Perhaps I should add a fourth reason: the existence of Stani's Python Editor, which looks to be a splendid open source, cross-platform Python IDE, written, with neat recursiveness, in Python. (Via NewsForge.)

NUN Better?

I wrote recently about Ubuntu's innovative approach to developing a distro, and here's further proof of that. It's called the New User Network - NUN to its friends:

The Aim of the Ubuntu New User Project is to try and help new Ubuntu Users get to grips with Ubuntu. Members of the New User Network will spend a lot of time on IRC, the forums and the mailinglists.

Nothing revolutionary, perhaps, but other distributions could learn a lot from Ubuntu's methodical way of going about things. (Via Linux.com.)

Update: And here's Gentoo also doing something interesting in this space.

Windows Media for Windows - Really

Little things can make all the difference. If there is some audio stream using Microsoft Windows Media Format that you absolutely must listen to, then switching to GNU/Linux is that much harder. So anything that removes such obstacles is to be welcomed.

Such is the case for the news that Real and Novell are working to make Windows Media work out of the box for GNU/Linux.

Big Blue Turns a Deeper Shade of Penguin

When I was writing Rebel Code, which describes the birth and rise of free software from Richard Stallman's initial idea for GNU, I was lucky. I needed something suitably dramatic to provide the other book-end, and IBM kindly provided this with the announcement on 10 January 2000 that it

intended to make all of its server platforms Linux-friendly, including S/390, AS.400, RS/6000 and Netfinity servers, and the work is already well underway.

It's hard now to remember a time when IBM didn't support open source, so it's interesting to see this announcement that the company aims to push even deeper into the free software world. Quite what it will mean in practice is difficult to say, but on the basis of what has happened during the last six years, it should definitely be good for the open source world.

What Took Them So Long?

The study declares that open source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s.IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.

They only just realised?

IDC never was the sharpest knife in the drawer. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

OA and Collectivisation

PLoS Medicine has put together a timely collection of some of its articles on HIV infection and AIDS. Nothing remarkable in that, you might say. But in principle it could have put together a collection of such articles drawing on other open access titles too.

Indeed, I predict this kind of collectivisation will become increasingly popular and important as OA journals gain in popularity. Because this kind of meta-publishing is only really possible in an OA world: traditional publishers would usually rather pull their own heads off rather than allow other rivals to use their texts.

Of course, you might point out that these same publishers will be able to include OA materials in their own collections, whereas PLoS, say, won't be able to draw on commercial titles. But that's fine: it would be an implicit recognition that OA journals are the equals of traditional titles, and would provide buckets of free publicity.

That's the great thing about openness: even freeloaders help the cause, whether they mean to or not. (Via Open Access News.)

After Darknets, Brightnets

The Owner-Free Filing system has often been described as the first brightnet; A distributed system where no one breaks the law, so no one need hide in the dark.

OFF is a highly connected peer-to-peer distributed file system. The unique feature of this system is that it stores all of its internal data in a multi-use randomized block format. In other words there is not a one to one mapping between a stored block and its use in a retrieved file. Each stored block is simultaneously used as a part of many different files. Individually, however, each block is nothing but arbitrary digital white noise.

Owner-Free refers both to the fact that nobody owns the system as a whole and nobody can own any of the data blocks stored in the system.

It's a fabulously clever approach, a simplified explanation of which you can find on Ars Technica.

Anyone who can write

Traditional rules do not apply. Mathematics is the only law.

is clearly on the side of the angels. But I fear that all this cleverness is indeed a matter of digital angels dancing on the head of a digital pin. The maths is indubitably delightful, but it wouldn't stand a chance in any court, which would simply dismiss the details and concentrate on the result: that copyrighted material is being accessed in different places.

It's all very well to say

No creative works, copyrighted or not, are ever communicated between OFF peers. Only meaningless blocks of random data. No tangible copies of creative works are ever stored on OFF peers.

But this cannot be literally true. If it were meaningless data, it would not be possible to access the copyrighted material; even if it is disembodied slightly, that meaning has to be present in the system, and transmitted between different users. Therein lies the infringment according to current copyright laws.

Mathematics is not, alas, the only law.

Heroes of the Healing

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.

Welcome to the Darknet

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.

Signs of Bubbledom, Part 43

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.)

Gecko Turns into a K-Meleon

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.)

The Wiki-God Speaks...Mysteriously

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.)

Saudi Censorship, Saudi Wisdom

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.

History Repeats Itself

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.

Just What We Don't Need, Honest

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.)

Hewlett and Packard, Meet Deb and Ian

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.)

Windows Live Writer - Half Open?

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.)

Now in Pre-Production: Free Software

I wouldn't normally write about software designed for the world of film and TV industries, but this seems pretty noteworthy. Celtx (pronounced "keltix") provides

the 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.)

ATI = A Total Idiot

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.

Free Software: As Approved by Buddhists

Choose free software, and keep the Five Precepts. (Via LXer.)

Spectrum's White Space as a Commons

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.)

Visualising an Ordered Universe

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.)

Fireproofing Firefox

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.

Is That All Human Knowledge in Your Pocket...?

...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.)

OpenCyc: Wikipedia with Intelligence

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.)