Lots of EPA in the EPLA

EPA, the better-known name of Eicosapentaenoic Acid, is associated with fish. This compromise on the EPLA (European Patent Litigation Agreement) also smells very fishy to me.

I hope I'm wrong.

All Hail, Mighty Ajax

As I may have mentioned before, I hate Flash. But this blog post about a report on the state of Web development gives me hope:

Most web technologies will apparently be used more - in particular Ajax, which next year is predicted to surpass Flash for the first time.

Did somebody say nike?

Warming Up Nicely with Firefox

Although it's hard to tell from this singularly unhelpful graph, Firefox continues to storm away. According to these figures, it has notched up 12.46% market share.

But perhaps what is most significant is the non-Microsoft figure, now at 17.90%. This represents the percentage of the Web browser market that Microsoft does not control; I predict that once it gets to, say, 20%, then things will really start warming up as just about everyone realises that coding for the non-standard IE only is no longer an option (who wants to lose 20% of the potential audience?).

Sinking Venice

Those pair of old Skypers, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are at it again. But curmudgeon that I am, I won't be sad if this particular Venice sinks without trace:

While the software turns your PC screen into something that looks a lot like your TV, the capabilities go far beyond anything you'll experience in your den. Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels. And on the right, there's a set of interactive tools that let you share video playlists with friends or family. An image at the top of the screen identifies the channel and the name of the clip you're watching. All of the images can be expanded by clicking on them with a mouse.

Turn my marvellously metempsychotic, and perfectly protean PC into a tarted-up tub of a TV? No, grazie. (Via IP Democracy.)

Organic Farming Goes Open Source

Now where I have heard this before?

Fears that organic farming is falling victim to commercial pressures to abandon key principles have led to disputes in the Soil Association, the gold standard of the groups that certify "green" products.

...

Claims of the relaxing of key principles in the organic movement come amid pressure from Sir Terry Leahy, the Tesco chief executive, for the British organic movement to become more "professional".

Hm, let's see: a fear that some may be abandoning key principles, while others call for more professionalism. Sounds rather like the "free software" vs. "open source" debate, to me...

Googling for Code

And talking of Google, it's apparently launched a search engine for source code. Not something that I'd ever use, but clearly very handy in the free software world when you're looking for a snippet or routine to study or even borrow.

In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Getting Creative with Money

The standard cry is: How do you make money from free? Well, Jamendo has a few ideas:

Jamendo sells advertising space on the jamendo.com web site and in the low-fi streamed music. We guarantee the hi-fi "peer-to-peer" music to be ad-free. This revenue helps us covering the bandwidth cost.

...

Jamendo drives lots of traffic to the artist's official web site as well, which helps to sell more physical CDs (if the artist sells CDs from their web site). Also, Jamendo's blogging capabilities help artists to spread in the blogosphere.

Finally, we are developing more tools to distribute Creative Commons music commercially. The revenue split will be somewhere around 80/20, with 80 for the artist.

(Via Creative Commons Blog.)

David Who? Oh, I See...

I don't know who this geezer is (clearly my fault), but he's seriously right-on. Not only does he have his own foundation that works

to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us. Focusing on four program areas – oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and the Nature Challenge - the Foundation uses science and education to promote solutions that conserve nature and help achieve sustainability within a generation.

which is about as right-on as you can get, but he also comes out with statements like

So if you ask me if it bothers me that politicians are stealing the solutions brought forward by my foundation, the answer is no. To use a computer term, we consider this information “open source.” It’s a free buffet; please take all you like. The whole reason why we do the research is to effect change. If those who have the power to make those solutions happen actually use that information, so much the better. This is how change happens.

Blige. My hero. (Via BoingBoing.)

Open Shakespeare Beta

Get your online honorificabilitudinitatibus.

MA ODF: The Soap Opera

You couldn't make this stuff up.

The man who succeeded Peter Quinn, the main engine behind the adoption of the ODF standard in Massachusetts, is also leaving, because of lack of IT funding. The ODF plans seem unaffected by this, but you can't help feeling there's more than meets the eye to all this.

It's a LibraryThing

Quite rightly, everyone raves about Wikipedia's million+ English-language articles as a monument of cumulative achievement. But in the background there's another major collaboration going on that's also talking telephone numbers: LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

and

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 45 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as "MySpace for books" or "Facebook for books." You can check out other people's libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

Recently, LibraryThing hit the six-million book mark; one knock-on consequence of this is that it includes works of even the most obscure writers.

The Iceman Cometh

USA Today has a chilling piece about the increasing number of libel cases being brought against bloggers:

Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. "It hasn't happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home," he says. "That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere."

Just think what it will do to the Technorati graphs.

Shiny Software and Pebbles on the Cairn

Here's an important point that needs making from time to time to encourage newcomers to participate in open projects:

No one takes contributions to an Open Source project and regards them as "substandard". They are simply contributions of varying quality and use.

Be it ne'er so small, a pebble on the cairn raises the cairn: and so it is with contributions to open source and the other opens. Indeed, this is one of many (interrelated) reasons why openness is so powerful.

Socialising with Social Media

Everyone seems to be giving away e-books under CC licences at the moment - and jolly good thing too. The latest comes from Antony Mayfield, the man behind the excellent Open (finds, minds, conversations)... blog.

It's called "What is social media?" and basically attempts to answer that question in words of n syllables, where n is a small number. Readers of this blog are unlikely to learn anything new, but it will be great for giving to Great Aunts to explain why you spend so much time online. Assuming they can read PDFs....

Crunching Nuvvo

I hadn't heard of Nuvvo, but now I have, I'm not surprised by this item from TechCrunch:

We wrote about Nuvvo, a brave startup taking on an open source competitor, last January. However, Nuvvo is now up for sale.

The "open source competitor" is Moodle, a course management system, which is one of the jewels in the free software crown.

As the TechCrunch headline puts it:

Fighting open source competiton may be foolish

Yup.

The Cost of Freedom - Not

"The cost of freedom in the digital age" is a sadly misguided article on openDemocracy that questions whether Creative Commons, open source and open access are "a just reward for creative endeavour", and concludes:

Free dissemination systems such as open access and creative commons are good and should be supported. The most excluded in society will benefit from not having to pay. But creative commons is not the right alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators. We are still only at the dawn of the digital revolution. It is likely that by the time we get to sunrise, more equitable alternatives will have been found. Until that happens, whoever ends up picking up the bill for content creation, there is little justice in charging the credit cards of scientists or short-changing authors of books and composers of music.

Well, no, actually: scientists do not pay with their credit cards for open access: the cost may be author-side, rather than reader-side, but it is picked up by one of the scientist's sponsors - be it the grant-giver (like the Wellcome Trust) or academic institution.

Similarly, it is incorrect to say that authors of books and composers of music are "short-changed" just because they adopt a creative commons licence, or to call creative commons an "alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators". There are well-attested cases of sales being boosted when a book is released under a CC licence (just ask Cory Doctorow or Yochai Benkler): in other words, more reward, not less. And even when sales aren't boosted, there are numerous other ways of making money from the reputation that CC publication can bestow (public appearances, consultancy, etc.).

Looking at new-style content distribution with the blinkers of old-style publishing inevitably misses these facets. Not so much the cost of freedom, then, as the cost of fettered thinking.

Doing the Joomla Mambo

Forks are a particularly intense moment for free software projects, and examining the reasons for and result of a fork throws fascinating light on the dynamics of the open source world.

One of the most famous recent forks is in the world of content management systems, when Joomla split off from Mambo. There's a fascinating - and impressively full - history of how and why that happened. It all seems to have turned out rather well, with both projects flourishing - a textbook case of how to manage a fork.

Good Signals from WIPO

We're not there yet, but things are looking much better on the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty front than anyone could have reasonably expected:

The negotiations have been tough (we hear), but the 2007 WIPO General Assemblies have come to a close with two huge victories for the public interest. On the Broadcasting Treaty, while the GA agreed to convene a Diplomatic Conference in November/December 2007, we now have two welcome safeguards in place

In particular:

It has also been decided that the [Broadcasting] treaty will now take a signal-based approach instead of the messy, dangerous rights-based approach that is used in the current treaty text. This, too, is good news for the Internet community, and reflects the concerns raised by many WIPO member countries at last month's meeting. There's much support for narrowing the treaty's overbroad scope to signal protection. The key question will now be how the next treaty draft reflects this in practice.

Fingers crossed. (Via Ars Technica.)

Feeling Mule-ish

Lots of people seem to be getting excited about Mule and MuleSource. I would too if it weren't for sentences like this:

Mule is a messaging platform based on ideas from ESB architectures. The core of Mule is a SEDA-based service container that manages service objects, known as Universal Message Objects or UMOs, which are plain old java objects. All communication between UMOs and other applications is made through message endpoints. These endpoints provide a simple and consistent interface to vastly disparate technologies such as Jms, Smtp, Jdbc, Tcp, Http, Xmpp, file, etc.

I found this interview with MuleSource's founder and CTO Ross Mason slightly more illuminating. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it all eventually.

Open Journalism, Transparently

I wrote about Jay Rosen and his open journalism experiment a few months back. If you're still unconvinced (or just a bit in the dark) do read this Slashdot interview: it's clear that Rosen has put a huge amount of effort into his answers that are clear, illuminating and packed full of great links.

A sample:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

DRMnation - Do Something!

It's easy to feel impotent in the face of the mega-corporations' assault on the commons of ideas. They are so big, rich and powerful and you are, well, just you. But there are things we can all do - 30 things to be precise, as this amazing checklist explains. Although its resources are aimed at the UK, its basic idea - that there are a lots of people we can contact to influence - is valid everywhere. Start your wordprocessors....

Update: And if you're looking for more to do, try this impressive list at DefectiveByDesign.

Soonr or Latr?

Soonr is one of the few new startups that seems to be offering a service that's useful; it lets you access your PC from a mobile phone, and place calls via Skype using the computer. There's only one problem: it's not open source. Make that two: there isn't even a GNU/Linux client. Maybe it'll happen, sooner or later.... (Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Eyeballs as Micropayments

Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.

I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.

Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:

Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

ODF Test Suite

One of the key features of the ODF standard is that it can be supported by many different programs. But this begs the question what the standard should look like in practice - i.e., which implementation does things properly.

This test suite, currently under development, goes some way to answering that by providing screen shots of various features in both OpenOffice.org and KOffice. It's both useful and fascinating. (Via An Antic Disposition.)