Now We Are Six

Apparently, OpenOffice.org is 6 today. Not a canonical number, but not one to be pooh-poohed either. Happy Birthday.

FCC Opens up a Little Wireless Commons

It's not much compared to the swathes of spectrum that have been auctioned off, but it's a start:

The FCC officially signed off on the plan to allow low-power wireless devices to operate in so-called "white spaces" in the television spectrum.

And Talking of Global Catastrophe...

The latest cheery reading from Friends of the Earth puts a price-tag of around £11 trillion (that's £11,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering) on the economic damage caused by runaway climate change, by the year 2100. An estimate, and probably an under-estimate.

And yet, we hear, the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol is "too high" for the US economy:

For America, complying with those mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers.

Right, a "negative economic impact": what, like to the tune of a few trillion pounds? I don't think so....

There's Monoculture, and There's Monoculture

Here's eWeek all breathless:

If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history.

Well, that depends how you define monoculture.

Yes, if you mean exactly the same machine; but definitely not, if you mean effectively the same environment. The honour of mega monoculture certainly belongs to Microsoft Windows, in all its later incarnations. Each has offered what is basically the same lush virtual mulch to several million crackers: the operating system, Internet Explorer and Outlook. What more do you need? As the unrelenting attacks based on just these elements show, you certainly don't need to have identical systems to succeed in sowing mayhem. (Via Techmeme.)

Ensuring We Act on Global Warming - by Insuring

I mentioned previously that it's a sure sign that things are moving if rich and respectable people like accountants start warning about global warming; and so when the insurance companies start doing it too, we must really be getting somewhere.

Moreover, it is precisely these people - not all us right-on greenies - that will ultimately make Mr and Mrs on the Clapham Omnibus do something: not because they necessarily care, but because it will cost them far too much not to.

Trying to Resolve Resolvo's OO.CBT

I'm torn.

On the one hand, OpenOffice.org is a powerful and therefore complex program, and so benefits from a little bit of training. On the other hand, the OO.CBT interactive tutorial from Resolvo (free for home users), while quite well done, is written entirely in Flash....

Ah well, you'll just have to make up your own mind on this one. (Via OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas.)

OpenWetWare

I've always rather like the term 'wetware', so I suppose I'm duty-bound to promote something calling itself OpenWetWare:

OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world.

In fact it's so cool, it offers its content under not one, but two open content licences: CC and GFDL. (Via Public Library of Science - Publishing blog.)

Just One Word: Why?

What do you get when you combine OpenSolaris, the GNU utilities, and Ubuntu? Nexenta -- a GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime.

Yes, fascinating, but why bother?

Never Mind About Firefox 2.0, What About 3.0?

Firefox 2.0 still not hot enough? What about Firefox 3.0? You even get a chance to put in a feature request.

EU: Not at All Patent to Me...

Well, I still don't really know what's going on as far as patents in Europe are concerned. But the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), an organisation whose judgement I generally trust in these matters, seems happy enough with the latest vote in the European Parliament:

"We're 80% happy with the result" comments Jonas Maebe, FFII board member. "The main unfortunate artefact left in the adopted resolution is the fact that it promotes accession of the EU to the European Patent Convention, which would delegate most patent-related responsibilities to the civil servants of the Commission and member states. Overall our main concerns are however addressed and we would like to congratulate the many MEPs and assistants who very worked very hard for this result."

Is Helium Enough of a Gas to Lift Off?

User-generated sites are becoming increasingly accepted as a viable way of creating information and even money. But there's a huge problem faced by any new entrant in this sector. For a site to draw in new contributors, it needs lots of readers; but to gain those readers, you need good content, which means lots of good contributors.

A good example of this Catch-22 situation in practice is the new Helium: there's nothing wrong with the site, but equally there's nothing special about it either (though the use of peer review is interesting), so it's hard to see it gaining the momentum needed for it to succeed. (Via ContentBlogger.)

Economics as Enemy of the Commons

A nicely provocative post from OnTheCommons.org, which points out the destructive effect of money on the commons:

What is called "economics" today is the world as seen through the myopic and tendentious lens of money and price. If something is transacted through money it has reality; if not it does not exist. It makes no difference that trees provide shade and neighbors provide comfort; it makes no difference that they serve real needs. They are not sold for money and therefore they do not count. Therefore, the more "the economy" destroys these things – the more it displaces that which is free for commodities that we have to buy for money – the more the economy is growing and the better life is getting, or so we are told.

Mouth, Meet Crow; Crow Meet Mouth

It looks like I was, er, wrong: ICANN has refused to pull the plug on Spamhaus. I'm impressed - and duly chastened.

EU OSS for OA

Here's the EU and International Atomic Energy Authority trumpeting all sorts of stuff, including the fact that the former's Joint Research Centre:

has developed software which monitors a wide range of open access sources such as news articles, research papers, reports and satellite images.

The ever-perceptive Peter Suber comments:

I'd like to see the EU make the software public and open the source code. I'm assuming it works with a separable database of cues and sources relevant to nuclear non-proliferation, which could remain classified. The software was developed at public expense, has general utility, and could serve another urgent public purpose: accelerating scientific research. It wouldn't be the only text-mining application around, but I'm assuming that the IAEA wouldn't have chosen it unless it had some strengths missing from other packages. The public gains when new tools and access policies make public research more useful than it already is --and OA benefits when new tools give authors and publishers an extra incentive to make their work OA.

Aunt Eudora Goes Open

For old-timers such as myself, the Eudora email client has connotations of pure Web 1.0-ness. During the 1990s it was more or less the definitive piece of Windows software for sending email if you didn't want to besmirch your name by using Outlook, once that existed. Times have changed, of course, and Thunderbird has now taken over that role.

So the announcement that future versions of Eudora will not only be open source but based on Thunderbird, seems to close the circle nicely. (Via LWN.net.)

The Parallel Politics of Copyright and the Environment

One of the ideas that I've been banging on about on this blog is the commonality of the commons - how entirely disparate areas like open content and the atmosphere have much in common. Of course, I didn't invent this meme, and there are plenty of others out there helping to push it. The latest I came across was Michael Geist, with a piece on this idea from a Canadian viewpoint.

Google's Legal Opportunity

In a comment to a previous post about Google's acquisition of YouTube, I muttered something about Google having losts of dosh and good lawyers to see off the inevitable lawsuits that will follow that move. Here's a rather more thoughtful take on that, ending with the following interesing idea:

So I think the YouTube acquisition may well represent a legal opportunity for Google (and the Internet industry generally), rather than a vulnerability. After all, litigation to define the copyright rules for new online services are inevitable -- better to choose your battles and plan for them, rather than fleeing the fight and letting some other company create bad precedents that will haunt you later.

Google's Writely and Spreadly Get it Together

I'm a big fan of Google's Writely online word processor - I now do most of my writing with it. I can't say the same about Spreadly, I mean the online spreadsheet, because it lacks basic features like charts (as far as I can tell). But Google are steadily making improvements - for example, by integrating the Writely and Spreadly file spaces.

A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Copyrighted Food

Just what the world doesn't need: the extension of copyright to food. (Via BoingBoing.)

Distributed Energy Generation

This looks eminently sensible from just about every angle:

Energy suppliers should make it easier for people to generate power for their own homes, the gas and electricity regulator, Ofgem, said today.

Why has it taken so long for the idea of distributed power generation to get going?

Going Down a FlickrStorm

I'm a big fan of Flickr, even if I don't have much call to use it. Perhaps one reason for that is that it's a bit of a pain finding stuff: tags are only approximate at the best of times. I think I might start using it some more thanks to FlickrStorm (update: now Wunderstock), a kind of search engine plus:

It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images... Be surprised!

When I gave it a whirl, I won't say I was deeply surprised, but maybe pleasantly so, on the basis of both the images it found, and the rather cool way it displayed them, with a scrollable set of thumbnails on the left that bring up the main photo on the right remarkably quickly. Worth taking a look. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Google Shoots an Elephant

So Google has done the deed, and bought YouTube.

I can't help thinking of a story by George Orwell, called Shooting an Elephant. In it he describes how, as a police officer in Burma, he was called to deal with a rogue elephant.

He went with his gun, and an expectant crowd gathered. It soon became clear that the elephant had calmed down, and posed no danger. But Orwell realised that despite this, he was going to have to shoot the elephant: the crowd that had gathered expected it of him, and whether it was the right thing to do or not, he had to do it. And so he did.

It seems to me that Google's acquisition has much in common with this story. Once news started leaking out, the crowd gathered, and Google had to buy YouTube, whether it was the right thing or not, because the crowd expected it.

In the same way, there is now a growing expectation that Yahoo will buy something big - anything - to "counter" Google's move. And so another crowd begins to form, and another elephant must needlessly die.

Bad, Bad Patent

First WIPO, and now this:

Businesses based on the licensing of patented technologies could be able to sue the owners of the patents while still using those patents if a biotech firm wins its landmark US case. The case could upend the basis of much US patent law.

...

While some argue that nobody is better positioned to assess whether or not a patent is valid than a licensee, there are worries that a precedent set by a MedImmune victory would create havoc. During the oral hearings one of the judges, Anthony Kennedy, said that a result in favour of MedImmune could "flood the courts" with cases.

I can't help feeling that this (possible) development is partly as a result of the constant hammering away by intellectual monopoly bores like me: even major companies like IBM and Microsoft are making noises about "bad" patents, and this case looks like it might be the tipping point for this discussion.

They Can Because ICANN

The court case against Spamhaus is outrageous on plenty of levels:

A lawsuit filed in an Illinois court by David Linhardt (aka e360 Insight LLC) against The Spamhaus Project Ltd., a British-based organisation over which the Illinois court had no jurisdiction, went predictably to default judgement when Spamhaus did not accept U.S. jurisdiction.

To get the 'SLAPP' lawsuit case accepted in Illinois, David Linhardt fabricated, under oath, that Spamhaus "operates business in Illinois". Illinois District Court Judge Charles Kocoras, although being aware Spamhaus was a UK non-profit organization, did not require any proof before ruling the UK organization to be in Illinois jurisdiction. Spamhaus in fact operates no business in the United States, has no U.S. office, agents or employees in Illinois or any other U.S. state.

The default judgement awards Linhardt, a one-man bulk email marketing outfit based in Chicago, compensatory damages totaling $11,715,000.00, orders Spamhaus to permanently remove Linhardt's ROKSO record, orders Spamhaus to lie by posting a notice stating that Linhardt is "not a spammer" and orders Spamhaus to cease blocking spam sent by Linhardt.

But one point which has only been mentioned in passing is that the latest threat of being suspended by ICANN is only possible because the latter is subject to US jurisdiction.

Which means that effectively US law is being imposed on the Internet, wherever people may be located. Which, in its turn, is yet another argument why ICANN needs to be pulled out of the US and situated somewhere less likely to be at the beck and call of courts in countries with histories of rampant litigation.

And no, I don't have any good suggestions where that location might be: any ideas?

The Cartridge Standard: Common, but how Open?

Defining industry-wide standards is usually good news - if they are open, that is. So when I heard abou the Common Cartridge Standard for digital educational content, my immediate thought was: is it open? It's hard to tell from the press release:

The IMS Global Learning Consortium announced today that a new standard for digital educational content and e-Learning systems will soon be available in products in the marketplace. Digital educational content, learning management systems, and learning software tools incorporating the new Common Cartridge interoperability standard will be available from some IMS members as early as the Spring of 2007. Demonstrated in June of 2006 by IMS Contributing Members ANGEL Learning, Blackboard Inc, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education, and the University of Michigan (the Sakai Project), the specifications will soon be released to the IMS Developers Network.

So the standard will be "released to the IMS Developers Network": but what does that mean? The only thing that gives me hope is the fact that alongside all the usual fat cats of educational content, there are two open source projects: Sakai and Moodle. Given their presence I can only presume it's all above board and open. I hope. (Via Open Access News.)