With the jolly kerfuffle over GNU GPL v3, it's easy to overlook the fact that the less well-known GNU Free Documentation Licence is also being updated, and that the first draft of version 2 is available. So why is this important? Because Wikipedia uses the GFDL.
Let's hope Jimmy Wales doesn't feel the same way Linus does over this process....
IBM's announcement of a new patent policy is obviously important, if only because Big Blue has a big collection of the critters. Whether it will do much to help fix a deeply broken system is another matter:The worldwide policy, built on IBM's long-standing practices of high quality patents and transparency of ownership, is designed to foster integrity, a healthier environment for innovation, and mutual respect for intellectual property rights. IBM encouraged others in the patent community to adopt similar policies and practices, more stringent than currently required by law.
For a good first analysis, see Andy Updegrove's blog.
Update 1: And here's a salutary reminder from Andy on why it's best to get all the facts before you express your enthusiasm.
Update 2: Richard Poynder also makes some good points about the move.
One of the problems with DRM is that it can override traditional copyright to forbid anyone ever having access to content: effectively it is removed from the intellectual commons forever. If that's too abstract, here's a concrete example of something that it's going to be hard to open up - with equally serious problems for the environmental commons.
...Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go...
Any pamphlet that begins with a quotation from John Clare about the first enclosure movement is clearly doing something right. As it happens, Rosemary Bechler's Unbounded Freedom, nominally "A guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organisations", does just about everything right. It is probably the single best short introduction to intellectual monopoly issues I have ever read. It is well written, accessible, packed with good examples and surprisingly comprehensive.
What's even more amazing is that it comes from the British Council, a body that used to be even stodgier than the British Library. Clearly - or Clarely - stodge ain't what it used to be. (Via OpenBusiness.)
Update: There's now a blog for discussing this book and its ideas. Sadly, there are already some rather obtuse comments that wilfully misrepresent the idea of open content. We've still got a long way to go....
I've written extensively - some would say too extensively - about Microsoft's long tradition of FUD. This has gone through many incarnations in a desperate attempt to find something that might convince people to stay away from that nasty GNU/Linux stuff. It appears that even the fertile minds of Microsoft's FUDmeisters are running out of ideas, since they've resurrected the old TCO argument.
I won't even bother going through why this PDF is a waste of electrons - even I'm bored with refuting these tired old arguments. But I would like to point out the underlying flaw with all these studies: that traditional TCO fails utterly to take into account things like the cost of vendor lock-in that the Microsoft route implies.
Even when the TCO for Windows is lower than that for GNU/Linux - and yes, it happens - there is the problem that Microsoft will always bring out a new version of Windows that requires massive software and hardware investments over and above those budgeted for in simplistic TCO analyses (i.e. all those prepared by analysts). Of course, according to Microsoft, this isn't a problem, since it represents a huge economic "benefit".
The British Library is not normally regarded as a beacon of enlightened thought when it comes to intellectual monopolies - it's in cahoots with Microsoft for much of it's IT stuff. But this "IP Manifesto" is decidely clueful:1 Digital is not different – Fair dealing access and library privilege should apply to the digital world as is the case in the analogue one.
2 Contracts and DRM – New, potentially restricting technologies (such as DRMs /TPMs) and contracts issued with digital works should not exceed the statutory exceptions for fair dealing access allowed for in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
3 Archiving – Libraries should be allowed to make copies of sound (and film) recordings to ensure they can be preserved for posterity in the future.
4 Term of copyright – The copyright term for sound recording rights should not be extended without empirical evidence and the needs of society as a whole being borne in mind.
5 Orphan works – The US model of dealing with orphan works should be considered for the UK.
6 Unpublished works – The length of copyright term for unpublished works should be retrospectively brought in line with other terms – life plus 70 years.
(Via Open Access News.)
Search lies at the heart of modern desktop computing (just ask Google). So if free software wants to make a breakthrough on the desktop, coming up with a better search tool might just be the way to do it. Perhaps this could help.
An interesting meditation on the way in which the application of the commons metaphor to information - something I've certainly been doing in these posts - commits the sin of ignoring the way in which computers, the creators of that metaphorical commons, are destroying the concrete commons of the environment through the toxic materials they habitually contain, and which are dumped when they reach the end of their life.
It therefore suggests:Perhaps the time has come to revisit the metaphor of an 'environmentalism for the net' to talk not only about multiple forms of resistance to an ever expanding intellectual property regime, but quite literally of the ecopolitical implications of the very infrastructures that facilitate and sustain the net.cultural dynamic of collaborative creation. Such an environmentalism, articulated conceptually and organisationally in the challenging context of electronics manufacturing's 'global flagship networks', could significantly broaden existing efforts by labour unions and NGOs to develop a broader agenda of economic and environmental justice.
Food for thought. (Via OnTheCommons.)
...without me noticing: Google Coop. It seems to be a tagging effort that provides cuts of Google searches. In doing so, it goes some way to turning the Web into the Semantic Web.
One of the central themes of this blog is how the ideas at the heart of free software - collaborative, participatory, distributed development - are gradually seeping out into other areas, with dramatic effects. Mostly I write about the obvious examples - open access, open content, open genomics etc. - but occasionally I slip in instances popping up in areas that seem to have little to do with software and yet are obviously still highly germane.
An example is this report called People and Participation. It comes from the dubiously-named "Involve", which sounds like a front for some bunch of religious nutters, but as a page entitled "Connectivity" makes clear, it has some interesting ideas that, er, plug straight into the technological origins of these movements:The 21st century is delivering endless opportunities to connect with one another wherever we are. The new technology that fills our pockets allows us 24/7 contact with friends, family and work; it is also central to Digital Britain, the second stage of the digital revolution that could transform the lives of everyone in the UK. But this new culture of connection is not limited to bluetooth and WiFi, connectivity also underpins the enabling state, the Government vision of a modern social contract.
(Via P2P Foundation.)
It seems that the old feed at
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml
is broken (I don't know whether this is a temporary glitch with the beta of the new Blogger or a permanent change). In any case, the following URL seems to work
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Update: As I rather suspected it might, the original address is now working again, so it was probably some problem at Google. The other address also seems to work, so you can take your choice. The bottom line is, whichever one you've subscribed to, you should be OK.
I normally try to avoid posting about politics, since it tends to bring out the worst in bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum. But I'll make an exception for this, since I think it makes an important point about politics in the age of blogs:Labour is a party that won and held power by mastering mainstream media, and as Mr Dale puts it "Blogs are a spin doctor's worst nightmare come true". That's bad news for the current ruling elite.
And good news for us proles.
There's a fascinating story on WorldChanging examining the current outbreak of the potentially lethal bacterium E. coli O157:H7 in the US spinach industry. Interestingly:A curious yet widespread claim is that, because some of the spinach so far identified as contaminated came from organic farms, organic farming is unsafe. It's a curious claim, because scientists understand pretty well where the O157:H7 is coming from: the bellies of factory-farmed cows. Their manure, as it turns out, is now crawling with the critters.
The piece then goes on to suggest:But I think there's something bigger coming, which is a move towards not just buying local food, but knowing the backstory of the food we buy.
...
Here, the backstory is what happened to our food before we bought it. Who raised it? Where was it grown, and on what kind of land? Did the farmer use fertilizers and pesticides, or integrated pest management? Antibiotics or free-range grazing? Was the soil conserved, or is it eroding? How did it reach us, and how was the money we spent on it split up?
Another way of putting it is that food should be open source, not the current "black box" that has to be taken on trust - with sometimes fatal consequences.
I have animadverted before upon the fact that I find TechCrunch - for all its undoubted virtues - just a little too breathless in its excitement over Web 2.0 startups. So a wry smile did play upon my lips when I came across the aptly-named Techcrush:
Techcrush will review the progress of web 2.0 startups 6 and 12 months after they debuted. Did their apps turn out to be a success or a failure?
No points for guessing which way most of them will turn out. (Via Alex Bosworth.)
If you thirst for new ideas, try this:Virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food or other products needed for its production. For example, to produce one kilogram of wheat we need about 1,000 litres of water, i.e. the virtual water of this kilogram of wheat is 1,000 litres. For meat, we need about five to ten times more.
The per capita consumption of virtual water contained in our diets varies according to the type of diets, from 1m3/day for a survival diet, to 2.6m3/day for a vegetarian diet and over 5m3 for a USA style meat based diet.
(Via WorldChanging.)
In one of my random wanders, I came across this neat encapsulation of a key advantage that open source companies enjoy:I sat in on a sales visit yesterday, and they were wowed by our demo and presentation. In fact, the results are getting so predictable with prospective customers that it’s almost boring - we show them the stuff, and they show us the money. Before coming to Hyperic, I had never seen sales calls this easy.
It's almost a truism that open source software sells itself; the knock-on consequence is that you don't really need salespeople, which in turn means more money for developers and support.
Kerala is probably best-known for its democratically-elected communist government, but its decision to go for GNU/Linux instead of Windows in its schools is probably now a close second. A few weeks back, Richard Stallman was explaining his role in the decision, and now here's a piece in Business Week that has some figures (alas, only made-up ones by analysts) about the broader Indian market. (With thanks to James Tyrrell for the link.)
Neither of these is new, but I've not mentioned them before, and I should have done.
Semapedia:Semapedia.org is a non-profit, community-driven project founded September 2005. Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.
...
To accomplish this, we invite you to create and distribute Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia (or any of Wikipedias' sisterprojects such as Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wikiquote). You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into our creation-form. Pressing the button will generate a custom PDF file to download and be printed. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. Others can now use their cellphone to 'click' your Tag and access the information you provided them.
SWiK:*SWiK.net is a project to help people collaboratively document open-source software*
SWiK is visited by over 10,000 people daily, it’s a place to make notes and publish articles on software development and open source projects, tag projects to help organize the world of open source, or just browse around and find interesting stuff.
I particularly like the Zeitgeist page as a snapshot of what's hot.
We know it works, and we know why it works, but somebody would like to know exactly how and why it works:A group of UC Davis researchers has just received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how open source software such as the Apache Web server is built.
...
The researchers will focus on the Apache Web server, the PostgreSQL database and the Python scripting language. They will collect information from the message boards, bug reports and e-mail discussions to understand how design teams organize themselves and interact.
Am I the only one who finds it slightly ironic that $750,000 is being spent to write some papers about something that is written for nothing? (Via LXer.)
Here's a fascinating project: Open Prosthetics. It's exactly what it says, free designs for prosthetics, although the exact licensing isn't entirely clear (anyone?). The back-story is told in Wired. (Via BoingBoing.)
An interesting coupling of Google with China - but not for the usual reasons.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the head of Google in China said:Open source software affords Google the flexibility it needs to be able to respond to market demands. Since Google can redesign its software anytime, it can follow market changes quickly.
Open source also gives Google better control over sensitive business information. "If we buy software from other companies, they can tell how many servers we have from how many we pay. Now, that's only our own business," Lee said.
Meanwhile, Ni Guangnan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, spoke of"taking our fate into our own hands." Ni says that China is promoting open source as part of its strategy of being an innovative country, for national information security, and to solve the software pirate problem. He estimates China's open source industry will boom in upcoming years.
Yale has jumped on the open courseware bandwagon - with a twist: Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Happily, this is rather more than just open courseware for the YouTube generation:
The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007.
(Via LXer.)
Good - if belated - news on the OOo front:First, OpenOffice.org shall get Firefox-like extensions capabilities by the 2.0.4. This release should be ready somewhere between the coming week and the end of the month. What this means is that besides the fact that OpenOffice.org could include extensions before, now the way to develop, include, select and manage them will be made easy. Aside the traditionnal .zip and unopkg extensions packages, a new and definitive extension format, .oxt, shall be used across the extensions that can be developed using a breadth of languages ranging from StarBasic to Java. New wizards and configuration tools shall be added for the benefit of our endusers.
Second, and I think that although we have no clear roadmap for this yet (besides, our version naming scheme is going to change once again ), OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future. Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite, connectors to Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange will also be developed accordingly.
Great, but why not Lightning instead, and then we'd be in complete harmony? (Via Slashdot.)
Posts
All Comments
To the extent possible under law,
glyn moody
has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to
this work.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
