John Battelle's Searchblog has become a little, er, sparse recently: I fear his other projects are taking up rather more of his time these days. But every now and then he comes out with a wise and succinct discussion of a major issue that makes hanging in there worthwhile.
His piece "Failure to Fail" is one of them, and sums up nicely my own feelings: it's a bubble, Jim, but not as we know it.
Freenigma is something that I have sought for ages: a way to send encrypted email from my webmail accounts - without having to do all the hard crypto-stuff, or indeed anything, really. Freenigma promises to do all this and more - see the FAQ for details. It's based on GnuPG, only works with Firefox:In the initial step, we support only the Firefox browser. However, we are already working on an implementation for the Internet Explorer, which we will only release if we receive enough requests for it. To be honest, we would prefer all our users to use Firefox because, due to the open source code, it is more trustworthy than proprietary products. Furthermore, the browser is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows).
It is, of course, completely free (premium services are in the offing, apparently.)
I've only just signed up, so I can't report on how well it works, but once I've used it in anger, I'll provide an update. As unnecessary government surveillance becomes more common, programs like Freenigma will sadly become more necessary.
News that Zend is picking up a fat bunch of VC dosh is no suprise: PHP is consisently one of the most popular options for the LAMP stack. What's more interesting is what they are going to spend it on:
“The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers,” said Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the co-founders of Zend Technologies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah: but what are you really going to do with it? (Via Matt Asay.)
If there's a tech meme of the moment, it's the GNU/Linux desktop, and whether it's viable. I've weighed in with my own slightly tangential views on the subject, but what's good to have is something a little more factual.
Surveys are always dodgy because of the scope for manipulation, but the one run by DesktopLinux.com has the huge advantage that it's being run and analysed by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, one of the very best open source journalists around. You can read the first of a series of his analyses here.
This is one of those things that you just want to work.
Wired has put up one of its stories - on wikis - to be freely edited by anyone. Or rather anyone who registers: this seems to be a threshold requirement to stop random vandalism as experienced the last time this was tried.
Judging by the results, the registration barrier seems to be working. The piece is eminently readable, and shows no evidence (as I write) of desecration. Maybe the wiki world is growing up. (via Many-to-Many.)
A nice piece in the New York Times about audio books based on public domain titles. Two points are worth noting. One is the following comment:
While some listeners object to the wide variety of recording quality, Mr. McGuire said, "our take on it is if you think a recording is done badly, then please do one and we’ll post it as well."
Which is classic open source stuff: don't like something? - do it better, mate.
The other point is that these audio books are truly open: since the source code (text) is public domain, anybody could alter it, and then record the variant. Probably best to start with a short text, but it could be an interesting experiment.
The number "5000" may not be a canonical one to celebrate, but the news that the Free Software Directory is about to hit 5000 entries is worth mentioning, if only because it's not as well known as it should be. After all, GNU software forms the backbone of free software, and so the directory is a natural first port of call when you're looking for some cool tools.
Interesting to note, too, the UNESCO co-branding (though I'm sure Richard Stallman wouldn't quite phrase it like that), part of the UN's increasing awareness and involvement with free software.
Normal service will be resumed shortly. Please note that some posts will be in the nature of catch-ups, and hence their content may well already be familiar to you. Thank you for your patience.
There will now be a short intermission, during which albatross will be available from the usherettes. Normal service will be resumed on the 30th August, if not before.
Licensing lies at the heart of free software. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Stallman's greatest legacy is the GNU GPL, since that first showed how to preserve the essential liberty of free software, and how to deal with free-riders. But as well as a boon, licences are also a bane: there are too many of the damn things, which is why I was a little unkind to the Honest Public Licence idea, good in itself.
In a way, it's surprising that it has taken the open source world so long to do some navel-gazing and look closely at the state of open source licences. The result, a draft of the License Proliferation Committee Report, makes fascinating reading.Originally, the LP Committee started to divide the OSI approved licenses into "recommended," "non-recommended" and "other" tiers. As we met and discussed, however, it became apparent that there is no one open source license that serves everyone's needs equally well. Some people like copyleft. Some don't. Governmental bodies have specific needs concerning copyright rights. As we discussed which licenses should be "recommended," it became clear that the recommended licenses were really the same as licenses that were either widely used (for example the GPL), or that had a strong community (for example Eclipse). Thus, we switched from the "recommended"/"non-recommended" terminology to a more descriptive terminology of:
-Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities
-Special purpose licenses
-Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses
-Non-reusable licenses
-Other/Miscellaneous licenses
We thought that these more descriptive categories may help people initially picking a license to use one of the more popular licenses, thereby helping to reduce the numbers of different licenses commonly used. We realize that the majority of open source projects currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licenses. We also realize that the GPL is a great license choice for some people and not so great a license choice for others. Thus, we can't just recommend that everybody use the GPL.. While such a recommendation would solve the license proliferation problem, it is not realistic.
We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the "popular and strong communities" group if any licenses in that group fit their needs. There are only nine licenses in this group and if everyone considered these licenses first when choosing a license for their project, some of the issues relating to license proliferation would diminish.
What's particularly interesting is that there are just nine licences in the "popular and strong communities" group, and that they are mainly the ones you'd expect:- Apache License, 2.0
- New BSD license
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT license
- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
- Common Development and Distribution License
- Common Public License
- Eclipse Public License
Most of these are well known; the only "strange" ones are the Common Public License, an early IBM choice, and Sun's Common Development and Distribution License.
Also of note is the Wizard Project:The wizard assists new licensors in choosing which licenses meet their goals. The wizard also lets licensors find licenses that almost meet their goals. We hope that being able to generate a list of existing licenses that meet defined goals will lessen the need for people to create their own new licenses.
This is very similar to a tool available on the Creative Commons site. Indeed, it's hard not to get the feeling that on this occasion the open source world is generally following developments in the open content world - not necessarily a bad thing, and a sign of the growing maturity of the latter.
For a while now, my daily desktop has been filled with almost nothing but Firefox windows, each of which contains a healthy/unhealthy half-dozen tabs. One of these, is Gmail, which takes care of my email. Another is Bloglines, which gives me that reassuringly constant flow of information. For my own blogging, I pour straight into Blogger. In fact, aside from the odd MP3 player, about the only other app that I use constantly is the OpenOffice.org word processor, Writer.
Maybe not for much longer.
For Writely, Google's Web-based word processor, has finally opened its registration to all (I stupidly missed the first round). Having tried it on and off today, I have to say I'm totally impressed.
As a writer, I depend on my word-processor to do the things I need, the way I need, and then to get out of the way. Writely seems to manage this. Since my technical demands are very limited - as a pure word-machine I almost never use anything fancy in the way of images, tables or boxes, although I do demand .odt support, which Writely provides - it may well be that Writely is all I will ever require.
Moreover, it offers one huge and unique advantage for me: it will let me work on any of my PCs, on any platform, without the need to copy across and sync files constantly. In time, I expect that this will extend to things like mobile phones, too; clearly, this kind of platform- and device- independence is the Writely way to work.
Here's a clever idea: put together a list of the top 1000 or so Web 2.0 sites, ordered by traffic rank. What's included?For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that "let people collaborate and share information online in a new way." So, Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an "old" company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do.
Sounds reasonable.
But what about the ranking the site uses? Well, that's according to Alexa traffic rank. Now, I'm a huge fan of Alexa, and even more of Mr. Alexa, Brewster Kahle.
But.
There's a big problem with Alexa's figures, in that they draw on the Alexa Toolbar, and the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer (Alexa offers some alternatives for Firefox users, but they are not real substitutes). This means that the rankings are seriously skewed towards what the more conservative part of the online world does - precisely the last people you would ask about Web 2.0.
Only half the Web 2.0 story, then, but I suppose it's a start.
One of my earliest posts on this blog was about Craig Murray and how he was using his blog to get out into the open ideas and information uncomfortable to the British Government. Well, he's at it again, dealing with issues that the mainstream media once again seems strangely loth to discuss.
This time, he's offering a rather different interpretation of the alleged UK plot to blow up planes. The basic idea is simple: that the revelation of this plot took place when it did because it was politically expedient to do so, not because of any inner necessity based on the state of the preparations. As well as the obviously convenient disappearance of the war in Lebanon from the front pages for a while, it also provided ammunition for Dick Cheney in his attacks on a particular strand of thought in the Democratic Party (read the post for the details).
More generally, the dramatic "thwarting" of the alleged plot provides yet another "justification" for draconian security measures, on the basis that it is better to lose a bit of liberty than all of your life. But of course, this convenient equation only works if the perceived threat is great enough, which requires, in its turn, a steady supply of reminders about the potential horrors of terrorism (which are real enough). The fact that few alleged terrorists have actually been convicted, even among the people that have been arrested, suggests that things are not what they seem.
Similarly, the strange "error" of releasing the names of most of the people held in the current "emergency" - which means that there is no hope whatsoever of convicting them, given UK laws - can be seen as a convenient way to have your terrorist cake and eat it: in a blaze of publicity you get to arrest people that are later quietly released because of some terrible "blunder" by some Bank of England functionary.
The only difference between this situation and the one painted by George Orwell in 1984 is that, today, squaring up to Big Brother we have the Big Blogosphere.
Eric Raymond - ESR - is a curious chap.
Interviewing him was definitely one of the highlights of researching my book Rebel Code: there was a thoughtful intelligence behind his replies that seemed perfectly of a piece with his most famous contribution to the open source world, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
And then we have Eric's blog, entitled "Armed and Dangerous." The kindest thing I can say about this is that here ESR comes across as a thinking person's Michelle Malkin.
It therefore comes as something of a relief to see that Eric has posted very little to his blog recently. Indeed, he's generally pretty low profile these days, which makes his appearance at LinuxWorld and the dispensation of traditional non-blog Eric wisdom there all-the-more welcome.
According to The Reg:Raymond said the community is not moving fast enough to engage with non-technical users whose first-choice platform is either an iPod, MP3 player or Microsoft desktop running Windows Media Player.
With iPod holding a massive market share and Windows Vista coming down the pipe, Raymond warned that Linux risks getting locked out of new hardware platforms for the next 30 years unless it proves it can work with iPods, MP3s and WMP.
I think this is a good point: for many, computers are really just big bits that you attach to an iPod or MP3 player, and so it's vital that GNU/Linux be able to play nicely here.
Fortunately, the WMP side is being sorted, and the MP3 handling was always quite good. The main problem is really Apple, with its wretched DRM. It's hard to see Steve Jobs finally seeing the light (he's probably too blinded by his own aureole), so it's clearly down to the community to come up with solutions.
Most people have heard of the tragedy of the commons; how about the comedy of the neglected private?
ECM - enterprise content management - may seem like a highly obscure field. It's actually critical important to businesses, but what interests me more is that this is one of four or five fields where open source is going to clean up soon.
So this post by Matt Asay about John Newton's thoughts on ECM consolidation caught my attention. For what it's worth, I shall be weighing in on this subject in due course (but don't hold your breath).
On Monday, Google finally came out with a beta version of its Blogger upgrade. God knows it's needed it: Blogger has fallen further and further behind its rivals, which is pretty extraordinary when you consider Google's lead in other fields.
The good news is that I will at last be able to add tags easily. The bad news is that there may be some strange sights as I explore new options and generally fiddle-faddle around. Your patience is appreciated.
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.)
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.
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.
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 itintended 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.
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.)
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.)
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 writeTraditional 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 sayNo 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.
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