On the Commonality of the Commons

One of the central themes of this blog is that the opens - open source, open content, open genomics and the rest - share certain key characteristics, and thus form part of a broader movement, of great historical importance.

There's a fine articulation of just this viewpoint in another of Richard Poynder's splendid interviews. It's with Michel Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's a typical sample from the second part - it's a two parter:

We need to increase the scope of applications in which open and free principles are applied; we need to apply and experiment with peer governance, and learn from our mistakes; and, as I said earlier, we need to interconnect and learn from each other, in the understanding that all these efforts are related, and have a larger common purpose.

In addition, we have to defensively stop the destruction of the biosphere, and stop the new enclosures of the information commons we are witnessing. Instead, we need to be constructively building the new world, and in a way that ends and means are congruent with each other. If we do this then the P2P subsystem will continue to strengthen, and eventually reach a tipping point. At that juncture it will become the dominant model.

On Subtractability and Excludability

Some more interestingly oblique thoughts on the concept of the commons and the impact of technology thereon.

Linus' Law and International Trade

If any proof were needed that open source has wide ramifications, consider this:

the open source software adage, known as Linus' Law (that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") is coming to apply to international trade and the global behavior of multinational corporations. With enough observers, all trade is transparent, whether the interests involved want it to be or not.

This is important, because for certain products - diamonds, for example - lack of transparency is crucial:

Diamond merchants depended on a veil of secrecy about the origins of their stones to protect them from the consequences of their trade. Global Witness realized that if it could tear down that veil, consumers would react with horror and disgust to the reality they saw

For example, they would learn that

the international trade in diamonds has destabilized whole regions and promoted criminal regimes. They have helped fuel the genocidal Congo wars and kept Angola in chaos. They are intimately tied to the black market in weapons. Terrorists even traffic in them to finance their plots. And these "blood diamonds" are sold in large numbers, by the billions of dollars, on the diamond bourses of Antwerp and other cities.

As well as diamonds, there is much to reveal about illegal logging and oil, and it's good to know that hackers have pioneered processes that are playing an important role here.

Scribing about Scribus

DTP is not something you normally associate with the world of free software. But there is an open source DTP package, and a damn fine one. It's called Scribus, it's cross-platform, and there's a nice tutorial about some of its more advanced features in Tux - a great magazine marred by annoying pop-up ads.

Sorry, Larry...

...but I can't agree on this one. You write:

Check out webcitation.org -- a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there's a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog ("http://lessig.org/blog"). It then created an archive URL "http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33". Click on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.

This is the TinyURL problem all over again. It destroys one of the greatest features of the Web: its transparency. You can generally see where you are going and some of the structure of what you will find there. TinyURLs and Larry's recommendation do away with this.

Another point is that it's actually harder to enter gobbledygook like "http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33" than even long, but comprehensible URLs, so this system doesn't even achieve the goal of making addresses easier to enter.

Agreed, we need an archive of the Web: but we already have one in the wonderful Internet Archive. What we really need to do is to support it better, with more dosh and more infrastructure.

Eclipse Waxes Stronger

One of the key issues that needed to be addressed in order to promote free software in the early days was support: until mainstream companies like IBM and HP started to offer formal support there was a natural concern that users of free software would be left to sort out problems on their own. So when IBM announces a similar step for Eclipse, it's clearly of great symbolic importance, whatever the reality of the offering.

It's Good to Talk

Web 2.0 is all about conversations, they say. So clearly what we need is a search engine for conversations. Enter Talk Digger:

Talk Digger is a web application developed by Frédérick Giasson that helps users to find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.

Talk Digger greatly evolved in 2006. I[t] started being a comparative search engine using the link-back feature of many search engines. Then it evolved in a full-scale meta-search engine reporting web sites linking to another web site. Then it evolved in a search engine of its own: a "conversation search engine" with feature helping the creation of communities around each conversation.

(Via eHub.)

OpenOffice.org Sprouts in Brussels

According to this story, the finance authorities in Belgium are starting a pilot project using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. Nothing earth-shattering in that, of course, but another nail in the coffin (it's a big coffin.) (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

People Power 2.0

One of the great conundrums of the open world is how to make money by giving stuff away. The solution, as far as I can tell, seems to be to capitalise on the uniquely personal aspects that can't be replicated by competitors by copying. After all, as I've described elsewhere, openness demands that anyone can build on your work by simply taking what you have done and using it, so you can't depend on making money from the control of open content, for example.

Again, as I've written before, it's striking that many top pop stars, for example, now make more money from their concerts than from selling music: the latter is simply a marketing device for the former. This means that music could be given away - no DRM - and stars could still make lots of money.

Now here's the same idea applied in a very different field - Web 2.0 companies. As this interesting piece on a recent acquisition in this sector points out:

With a wide array of sources for private equity providers there is a great deal of competition for leadership and vision in spending their money effectively. Increasingly this calls upon both startups and developed properties and their management to be "hired" in effect to help the "winners" finance their next dreams.

It's a natural adaptation to an investment market that's much less likely to push half-baked ideas to a hasty IPO and far more likely to invest in people with the acumen to move quickly and effectively in rapidly shifting content markets driven by equally rapid shifts in technology.

The really innovative and unique thing that a Web 2.0 company has to offer is the intelligence and originality of the people that power it. Others might be able to copy and re-implement your ideas (you know, that sharing business), but if they can't come up with an equivalent flow of creativity, they are always a step behind.

Microsoft's Cracked Sense of Priorities

Once again, Bruce is on the money - literally.

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Why is that?

Because it makes near-term financial sense to Microsoft. The company is not a public charity, and if the internet suffers, or if computers are compromised en masse, the economic impact on Microsoft is still minimal.

Microsoft is in the business of making money, and keeping users secure by patching its software is only incidental to that goal.

But a DRM crack is another matter:

this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this "vulnerability" is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer.

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

And this isn't going to change anytime soon - not until the underlying economics of security changes.

The Semantic Newspaper

Here's a typically thoughtful meditation from Techdirt that considers ways in which newspapers could usefully embrace not just the Internet, but its more advanced technologies like the Semantic Web. It's an interesting idea, but I fear we may have to wait a while to see it implemented by any of the big names, even the savvy ones (yup, that's you, Guardian.)

Oooh, Look: MOOXL

Rob Weir has spotted an interesting fact about Microsoft's implementation of MOOXL compatibility for Office XP, and its relationship to ODF support.

IPv6: You Know It Makes Sense

The Internet is deeply, deeply broken, it's just that nobody's noticed. Fortunately, the solution is already to hand. Unfortunately, nobody is really bothering to use it. It's called IPv6, and is version 6 of the Internet Protocol that holds the Internet together; we're currently all running version 4, and it's just not working (version 5 seems to have got lost somewhere).

If you want to know why IPv6 is important and fun, read this great article, with more to come.

NeoOffice 2.0 Beta

One of the under-appreciated qualities of free software is its cross-platform nature. The fact that Firefox and OpenOffice.org are available for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux gives it a unique advantage. This makes the arrival of the beta version of NeoOffice 2.0, particularly important because, as this article explains:

Although OpenOffice.org 2.0 is available for OS X, it is an X11 binary. NeoOffice uses a fully native Aqua interface, is integrated with OS X system services such as clipboard, drag-and-drop, and Spotlight, and uses OS X's font, printing, and internationalization subsystems.

Open Knowledge Definition 1.0...

... is out.

The Commons of Silence

Well, who could fail to be intrigued by a posting entitled "Ivan Illich and Silence as a Commons"? Especially when it links to an essay called "Silence is a Commons" by said Illich (dating back to 1983), with the following definition of a commons:

People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest.

An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church - and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons ... they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community's survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.

Open Source Robotics Toolkits

One more for the open source ticklist: robotics toolkits. Here's an article explaining what they do and what's available. (Via LXer.)

Touchez Pas au Pingouin

Now here's a daft idea:

if Linux wants to be taken seriously by the business desktop market, it has to first take itself more seriously. What do I mean by that? Basically, kill the penguin and all of the marketing cuteness!

GNU/Linux does not "want" to be taken seriously by the business desktop market: if it is, well and good, but the outcome will have little effect on the course of free software. I've already suggested elsewhere that the transition to an open source desktop is happening, but not in the way you might think.

The whole point about GNU/Linux is that it is different; trying to accommodate the business market by betraying its own nature would be a huge mistake. Don't touch the penguin.

Torvalds' New Book on Open Source

Who better to write a book called Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, than Torvalds? And this book is indeed written by Torvalds - Sarah Torvalds. Admittedly she's the translator rather than the author (who is Henrik Ingo), but she is perhaps the next best thing to Linus Torvalds: his sister.

Substitutability and Modularity

Wise words from Bob Sutor on substitutability:

the ability to take one software application from one provider and put in its place another application from a possibly different provider. Open standards enable interoperability and hence substitutability.

Open standards may enable such substitutability, but it is open source that lives and breathes the principle, thanks to its higly modular structure. This means substitutability can be applied at the level of the sub-routine, and not just for entire apps.

I'll Have What Doug's Having

Doug Engelbart is The Man: he invented practically everything clever in recent computing, from the mouse through to hypertext. One of his lesser-known but more ambitious projects was the Open Hyperdocument System. Or rather is, since it's back as HyperScope 1.0:

The HyperScope is a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways. It's the brainchild of Doug Engelbart, the inventor of hypertext and the mouse, and is the first step towards his larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System.

The HyperScope is written in JavaScript using the Dojo toolkit and works in Firefox (recommended) and Internet Explorer. It uses OPML as its base file format. It is open source and available under the GPL.

In practice, this sounds like fine-grained navigation and presentation of documents (although it seems to be much more). There's even a demo you can try out.

After just a brief perusal of this stuff, I can confidently say I don't really know what's going on. But if it's good enough for Doug, it's good enough for me. (Via Techmeme.)

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fluxbuntu

One of the reasons why free software will ultimately triumph is that it is based on the eminently sensible idea of building on other people's work. That is, you do not need to re-invent something from scratch, but can take the achievements of others and improve upon them - and then make your own efforts available for further development.

This can happen at the level of sub-routines, chunks of code, libraries, applications and even distributions. Oen of the most dramatic examples of the latter is the proliferation of the Ubuntu family.

This was originally based on the GNOME desktop, so those who preferred KDE soon took the code and swapped in the latter to produce Kubuntu. Others, who prefer the Xfce desktop environment, have come up with Xubuntu. And now, for lovers of the svelte Flux Box desktop, there is Fluxbuntu. Screenshots are available to whet your appetite.

Is Writely Right for You?

And talking of Writely, here's a handy round-up of Web-based word processors. I'm pretty pleased with Writely, not least with its ODF support. The one area where I find it lacking is in the organisation of files: there doesn't seem to be any way to create folders for grouping documents.

But I've not used other systems like ajaxWrite, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Writer; if you want to find out how they stack up against Google's offering, read the review. (Via Newsforge.)

The ODF Dark Horse: IBM Workplace

By now, everyone (well, nearly) knows about ODF support in things like OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Writely. But a name that may not be so well known is that of IBM Workplace. This mysterious and slightly amorphous product is finally pinned down with almost obsessive thoroughness by Andy Updegrove in one of his continuing series on the ODF environment. Read it for more than you ever wanted to know about the subject.

Indian Simmer

I was lucky enough to make a couple of extended visits to India some years back, and I still follow developments there as closely as I can. One area of particular interest is that of intellectual monopolies, where the country has a rather ambivalent attitude. Support for software patents seems to ebb and flow, and it's never quite clear to me what the final situation will be.

This finely-written piece from Intellectual Property Watch is fascinating in itself, and also seems to hold out the hope that software patents are not about to be meekly accepted - certainly not by the splendid Yatindra Singh of India's Allahabad high court, the central character of the story. But it's not just about him: there's all kinds of fascinating historical background as well as up-to-the-minute information about moves on the copyright front. There's a lot simmering away in India, it seems.