Nupedia Out in the Open

Remember Nupedia? No, not many people do. But it was the trail-blazing precursor of Wikipedia. Apparently the code is open source, and it's available from Larry Sanger, Nupedia's Editor-in-chief, and co-founder of Wikipedia.

The Tired Old "Innovation" Argument

One of Microsoft's favourite justifications for its monopoly is that any brake on it would be a brake on "innovation" - as if Microsoft were some hotbed of the latter. The danger with letting this kind of nonsense pass unchallenged is that others start using it. Here's a prime specimen:

Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Thomas Barnett, assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s antitrust division, warned that forcing companies to reveal their intellectual property stifles innovation. He used Apple as an example, in a nod to growing discontent in Europe regarding the way that music purchased from iTunes is tied to the iPod.

Well, no: if you read works like the splendid Against Intellectual Monopoly, you find in fact that

intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

The book gives plenty of examples - like James Watt and the steam engine - that are eye-opening in this respect. And since the book is freely available, there's no excuse for not finding out about these fascinating things and helping to stamp out this wretched "innovation" meme.

De-fanging Data Retention in the EU

The downside of the European Union is that Europe-wide laws can be passed in a completely undemocratic way that affect everyone. The upside is that challenging such laws - and winning - can effectively knock them out all across Europe. This makes the effort by Digital Rights Ireland to fight the paranoid EU Data Retention Law critically important. Send them all your lucky shamrocks. (Via The Open Rights Group.)

Copyright Explanations Done Right

I know that Cory Doctorow gets up some people's nostrils - there's even a site dedicated solely to his denigration - but you've got to allow that the man (a) knows what he's talking about when it comes to copyright and (b) can really write when he has a following wind.

I offer Exhibit A, entitled "How Copyright Broke", without doubt one of the most accessible introductions to where copyright came from and what's wrong with it. It's the perfect solution for explaining a tricky subject to aunts and uncles.

WIPO's Poison Cloud Draws Nearer

I've written before about the pernicious WIPO Broadcasting Treaty that is being discussed. Sadly, it's rumbling ever closer, and bringing with it a terrible cloud:

US industry was prominent at the meeting, as several representatives from information and communications technology (ICT) companies were there in opposition. Jeffrey Lawrence, director of digital home and content policy at Intel, said it would create a "whole cloud of liability issues."

"We have the patent cloud, the copyright cloud, and now we’re going to have a broadcast cloud," Lawrence said. He predicted such a treaty would "stifle innovation because it creates uncertainty." In addition, it has significant Internet ramifications, as it could impact cable and home networking, seen as critical to ICT industries. The movement of content is the "next killer application" for industries, he said. Lawrence called on industries to "stand up" to fight the treaty as it is proposed. Other opposed companies present at the meeting were Verizon and AT&T.

The Planet Meme

I've got a new column up on Linux Journal in which I talk about some of the various hacking blogs around. One thing that struck me was how many are called "Planet this" or "Planet that". Now a reader has kindly pointed out that this is down to some cool software called, er, Planet:

an awesome 'river of news' feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first.

The listing of Planets - dozens of them - on the site is impressive.

Update: Here's some practical info on how to set up and use Planet.

Gates Supports Open...

...Access. Amazing, the Gates Foundation is giving to

Public Library of Science (PLoS), to launch a new medical journal on neglected diseases -- US$1.1 million: PLoS will launch PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a new open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal covering science, policy, and advocacy on neglected tropical diseases.

Yup, that's "open access", as in practically the same as open source, but applied to academic papers.

Hm, Gates is piquantly close to getting it.... (Via Open Access News.)

We Have Lost the War...

...the techno-war for liberty, that is. At least, that's what the venerable Computer Chaos Club (CCC) reckons:

"We have lost the war ," is what it all boils down to according to the assessment delivered by Frank Rieger, the former CCC spokesman, at the last CCC Congress in Berlin in December. "We are living in that dark world of sci-fi novels we always sought to forestall. The police state is now."

...

The new technologies have opened up a plethora of possibilities for collecting, storing and linking data. The desire to data mine these huge international repositories has become ever more intense, especially since 9/11. Scared people make for pliable populations and governments have no hard time getting their hands on the information they want. Whence the relinquishing of civil rights and liberties is taking place - in a creeping fashion.

The CCC has not been able to prevent these developments. But it saw them coming. Since its founding on September 12, 1981 the Club has sought to be more than a kindergarten for nerds and geeks. Very early on the CCC showed a commitment to educating the public. It has repeatedly warned of the downsides of the technology it so fervently embraces. An attitude that may appear a little schizophrenic but that is nonetheless indispensable.

Bad News in Your Inbox

I have been asked so many times "Is it possible to tell if someone has read my email?" And the answer, of course, is no: email gets sent; whether it is received or read is entirely unknown.

Unless you use DidTheyReadIt. I presume this works by adding an invisible HTML element to the email message that calls back to the company so they can track when messages are read. Although this might satisfy people who insist on knowing whether their masterpieces have been read, it's really Bad News because of the tracking it carries out. And just think of the field-day spammers will have: now, they won't have to guess whether an address works or not.

I hope that email clients will add the facility to block this kind of stupidity. It's not what email is about: if the person who receives your email can't be bothered to reply, either your message wasn't important enough - or maybe they aren't. (Via Lessig .)

More 2.0 Trouble

And talking of Web 2.0 trouble, the news that Bart Decrem is leaving Flock, the company he helped to found, and of which he was CEO, doesn't look too good, despite the corporate spin being put upon it. (Via The Inquirer.)

Going to the Dogster

There is an iron rule in the Internet world: once people start launching services for pets, the End is Nigh. For Web 1.0, the classic case was Pets.com; and now, for Web 2.0, we have Dogster:

We are dog freaks and computer geeks who wanted a canine sharing application that's truly gone to the dogs. Such a site didn't exist, so we built it ourselves. The fluffy love is backed with serious technology and years of coding experience under our collars. Dogster has since become more contagious than kennel cough.

As the Website itself puts it: "for the love of dog...." (Via GigaOM.)

Living for LiveCDs

Live CDs - bootable, self-configuring GNU/Linux distributions - are one of the free software world's secret weapons. They not only let you try out a distro before installing it, but they also let you swap between them as easily as swapping CDs. Try doing that with Windows (of which there is pretty much only one main variety, anyway).

So I was pleased to come across LiveCD News to satisfy my hunger for info on this front, one to put alongside the equally indispensable DistroWatch, which plays the same role for GNU/Linux distros in general. (Via Digg.)

Well Done, Wales

Jimmy's done it again.

After my last encomium, Jimmy Wales has now taken on Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Britannica, in an email exchange that includes the following words from Wales (plus his elfin helpers, I presume):

You wrote: "I have had neither the time nor space to respond to them properly in this format. I could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia and weave them into my posts, but it seems to me that our time and space are better spent here on issues of substance."

No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article on the topic.

Fortunately, there is a vast army of volunteers eager to help good people like you and me who don't quite have enough time and space to do everything from scratch ourselves, and they are writing a comprehensive encyclopedic catalog of all human knowledge. They have quite eagerly amassed a fantastic list and discussion of dozens of links to such articles.

We are open and transparent and eager to help people find criticisms of us. Disconcerting and unusual, I know. But, well, welcome to the Internet.

And yes, this is an issue of substance and a fine demonstration of the strength of the new model.

PubMed Mashup

I'm a huge fan of PubMed. If you've not visited it, it's well worth the effort. It's the nearest thing we have to a complete compendium of medical knowledge. Most of it, alas, is only at the abstract level, but as open access takes off, PubMed will become the natural gateway to the full texts (and there's a UK PubMed under construction, too).

So I was interested to see this mashup involving PubMed: a Greasemonkey script that adds blog post trackbacks to PubMed. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

The Tragedy of the Faux Commons

Here's a perceptive post that points out all is not well at the commercial Web 2.0 sites like MySpace:

The problem is that many social networks hosted by corporations are essentially appropriating – and monetizing – the socially created value of the commons for themselves. They entice users onto the faux commons by offering them recognition and attention to a large audience – but then they leverage the power of the assembled commons for their own profit, at the expense of users.

And it concludes with a chilling thought:

If the first enclosures were those of common lands in Great Britain, and the second enclosures were those achieved through expansions of copyright and patents (Cf. James Boyle), then the "third enclosures" (as Michel Bauwens calls them ) uses contract terms (with users of websites and software, and with trustees of public resources) to convert commons into proprietary monopolies.

Open Data: Past, Present and Future

Peter Murray-Rust has an interesting post on the concept of open data, its (short) history and its present status, with some good links. As he notes:

There seem to be several related threads:

* scientific data deemed to belong to the commons (e.g. the human genome)
* infrastructural data essential for scientific endeavour (e.g. GIS)
* data published in scientific articles which are factual and therefore not copyrightable
* data as opposed to software and therefore not covered by OS licenses and potentially capable of being misappropriated. (this is a very general idea)

He points out that "the current usages are sufficiently close that we should try to bring them together", a move that would help open data's future greatly.

Malaysian Open Source Pilots Flying High

It's probably only natural that we tend to hear about the headline pilot schemes for open source: after all, these are (usually) the big breakthrough. But in a sense what really counts is whether the pilots are successful and there is a wider roll-out of open source. So it's good to find that in Malaysia, at least, the pilots were successful and that the roll-out is indeed proceeding. (Via LXer.)

Update: Here is the excellent and self-explanatory Open Malaysia blog, which looks to be a good place to follow this story.

Greetings, OpenDocument XML.org

OASIS may not be the grooviest organisation, but it's certainly helped ODF achieve respectability remarkably quickly. Now it's set up something called OpenDocument XML.org:

This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content. Use this site to:

* Learn. Knowledge Base pages provide reliable background information on OpenDocument.
* Share. OpenDocument Today serves as a community bulletin board and directory where readers post news, ideas, opinions, and recommendations.
* Collaborate. Wiki pages let users work with others online and add new pages to the site.

Now That's What I Call EMusic

Good to see that the world's best music download service is coming to this side of the pond. Now if they only had a few duduk tunes....

It's Academic

I know this is only a "stylized mathematical model" of how Windows and GNU/Linux interact in the marketplace, but it's more akin to a Swiss cheese model, so many holes does it exhibit. For example:

The model captures what we believe are the most important features of the Linux-Windows competitive battle (faster demand-side learning on the part of Linux and an initial installed base advantage for Windows), but makes important assumptions regarding other aspects.

"Faster demand-side learning" has almost nothing to do with it these days: issues like control, stability and security are more to the fore.

And then this is a completely erroneous assumption, too:

Our paper introduces a dynamic mixed duopoly model in which a profit-maximizing competitor (Microsoft) interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (Linux), with the installed base affecting their relative values over time.

Nobody equates GNU/Linux with zero price anymore: even if TCO is a slippery concept, it is certainly more realistic than simply looking at the price tag, as this study does.

And so on, and so on. The fundamental problem is that open source is driven by so many complex - and often non-economic - factors that any simplistic mathematical modelling is doomed to fail from the start.

Wales Gives It Some Welly

I can't say I see eye-to-eye with everything Mr. Wales does, but in this case he seems to be on the side of the angels:

The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries.

Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing.

Wikipedia, a hugely popular reference tool in the West, has been banned from China since last October. Whereas Google, Microsoft and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia.

(Via Slashdot.)

Widgetification = Modularisation

An interesting piece by Om Malik (not on GigaOM) about the rise of the widget. But no surprise here really: the atomisation of programs is just another reflection of the tidal wave that is open source currently sweeping over programming in general. As I've written several times, modularity is key to free software's success: widgetification is simply the same idea applied to Web services.

King Harald's Great GPL Victory

Harald Welte, untiring defender of the GPL, has won a splendid victory in the German courts. No details yet, but this is what King Harald has to say in his royal blog:

Victory!

Today I have receive news that we've won the first regular civil court case on the GPL in Germany. This is really good news, since so far we've only had a hand full of preliminary injunctions been granted (and an appeal case against an injunction), but not a regular civil trial.

The judge has ruled, but the details of the court order have not been publicised yet. I'll publicised the full details as soon as thus details are available in the next couple of weeks.

Go, Harald, go. (Via Heise Online.)

Update: Details have now emerged, as has a clarification of what the court decided:

the judges in Frankfurt-on-the-Main also confirmed the fundamental validity of the GPL: "In particular, the provisions of the GPL cannot be read as a relinquishing of copyright or copyright-law legal positions," the judges write in their opinion. The court explicitly confirmed as valid paragraph 4 of the license, which prohibits distribution of any kind in the event of any GPL clause being violated. D-Link had therefore not been entitled to market the GPL-licensed software without abiding by the conditions imposed by the license, while Mr. Welte for his part had been entitled to send the warning notice and make his claims for reimbursement, the judges state.

Digital Lard

Nice.

Google Spreadsheets - Nearly There

I find that my way of working is becoming increasingly Webified: I use Gmail, Writely and (just occasionally) the odd bit of Firefox. One of the key apps still missing from that line-up is the spreadsheet. Google's online Spreadsheets wasn't a serious option, because it didn't offer ODF suport - until now. If they could just get the charts sorted out, I would be too. (Via Tecosystems.)

Update: Google Spreadsheets is known as "Spreadly" among Googlers, apparently. I like it.