Gotcha!

This story from Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about someone allegedly trying to copyright a fabric seems to be fading away, but its life has not been in vain: it's brought us this wonderful parting shot:

Thanks Cory, you really got us! We were really putting one over on everybody - and you totally busted us! Saving the world from evil fabric stores, you are, one post at a time...

Ha!

KOffice 1.6 - No Mere Point Upgrade

Well, not if you look at what's on offer:

# Krita Becomes Usable for Professional Image Work
Krita and its maintainer Boudewijn Rempt won the aKademy Award for "Best Application" at this year's KDE conference in Dublin. With features such as magnetic selection, effect layers, colour model independence and full scriptability, it has risen to become what is probably the best free image editing program today.

# Lots of New Features in Kexi
Kexi, the desktop database application competing with MS Access, is the other application in KOffice that is already the best of its kind. Kexi has received over 270 improvements since KOffice 1.5. With this release, Kexi gains such features as the ability to handle images, compact the database, automatic datatype recognition and Kross scripting tools.

# KFormula Implements OpenDocument and MathML
The formula editor of KOffice now supports OpenDocument and MathML and uses it as its default file format. It also surpasses the equivalent component in OpenOffice.org, scoring 70% on the W3C MathML test suite compared to 22% for OpenOffice.org Formula. We see this as one example where the work to provide a very well-structured codebase of KOffice pays off to create a superior support for the existing standard.

KOffice is clearly storming away. I can't wait for the Windows port to introduce more people to the free software way....

And Now, the Community's MySQL

MySQL's success is impressive, and provides a handy example of pervasive corporate open source that isn't Apache. Although I'd seen about its new Enterprise offering earlier today, I must confess I hadn't picked up on the complementary Community product until I read this post by Matt Asay. It's a shrewd and necessary move that will doubtless be imitated by others.

Upgrading the Economic Operating System

How can you not love a book whose author introduces it thus:

My latest book, Capitalism 3.0, is out this week. It’s about how to upgrade our economic operating system so that it protects the planet, shares income more equitably, and makes us happier, while preserving the strengths of capitalism as we know it. The key to my proposed upgrade is to rebuild the commons, that dwindling set of natural and social assets that benefit everyone.

In the spirit of enlivening the cultural commons, the book’s publisher, Berrett-Koehler, has agreed to an experiment. They are selling the book in the usual places — in bookstores and on-line — but they’re also allowing readers to download the book from this web site for free.

I've not read it yet, but will do: I'm sure it'll be worthwhile. Until then, I suggest everyone spread the word to reward the author and his enlightened publishers, and to fulfil the former's hopes - and help with that upgrade:

As the author, here’s what I hope will happen. I hope many of you will download and skim the book. If you’re intrigued, you’ll read the preface and first chapter either on the screen, or by printing just those pages. You’ll then decide you want to read the whole book, give a copy to a friend, or keep it on your bookshelf or coffee table. So you’ll go to your local bookstore, or to an on-line vendor, and buy the handy, long-lasting version, printed on acid-free paper.

YRUHRN? - To Crowdsource a Book, Of Course

I've written about crowdsourcing before, and this is an interesting application: writing a book called "Why Are You Here - Right Now" (YRUHRN).

Project YRUHRN was started with one idea in September of 2006. It all started with a HIT posted on Amazon's mTurk offering a penny for your answer to 'Why are You Here - Right Now?'. From that HIT, over 500 answers were given in a weeks time.

We have taken those answers, and compiled them in a book that will speak to a part of everyone.

We will see if it is possible, through crowdsourcing and the power of work-at-home people, if a book can be written and published in just 30 days from idea to publishing.

Evidently it was, and the result can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com (for a while, at least).

Re-birth of a Commons

A glimmer of hope: trees as the anti-desert, and the (re-)creators of a new commons.

True Open Access

One of the things that continues to amaze me about blogs is the quality of some of the writing. A case in point is this fantastic essay by Richard Poynder. It's an extremely thorough consideration of whether open access means that peer review is on the way out.

Here are a couple of ideas that were new to me:

In September, for instance, a group of UK academics keen to improve the way in which scientific research is evaluated launched a new OA journal called Philica.

Unlike both Nature and PLoS ONE, Philica has no editors, and papers are published immediately on submission — without even a cursory review process. Instead, the entire evaluation process takes place after publication, with reviews displayed at the end of each paper.

and

Philica is not the only new initiative to push the envelope that bit further. Another approach similar in spirit is that adopted by Naboj, which utilises what it calls a dynamical peer review system.

Modelled on the review system of Amazon, Naboj allows users to evaluate both the articles themselves, and the reviews of those articles. The theory is that with a sufficient number of users and reviewers, a convergence process will occur in which a better quality review system emerges.

And you're getting it all for free: true open access. I just hope you are grateful.

Be Asked, and Ye Shall Receive

Here's an interesting Ars Technica story about Microsoft being forced to do the right thing - and benefitting from it - with its rival to PDF, called XPS:

Microsoft had previously indicated that its XPS technology would be licensed "royalty-free" to developers, and the company also promised a so-called "covenant not to sue" provision for businesses working on XPS print support, scanning technologies, and certain graphics display technologies.

However, at the behest of the EU, Microsoft is now taking matters a step further. A company spokesperson told Ars Technica that Microsoft "agreed to submit our new fixed-layout document format—the XML Paper Specification—to a standards-setting organization, and to revise the licensing terms on which the specification is made available to other software developers."

Microsoft is looking again at its license in order to make it compatible with open source licenses, which means that the "covenant not to sue" will likely be extended to cover any intellectual property dispute stemming from the simple use or incorporation of XPS. The end result is that using XPS may be considerably more attractive for developers now that the EU has apparently expressed concerns over the license.

The moral: open up, and you reap the benefits.

A Question of Trust

Back in the 1990s, I used to write about VRML quite a lot. VRML - Virtual Reality Modelling Language - seemed like the future, but turned out not to have one, at least not in that form. As you may have noticed, it more or less disappeared, though I now realise where it went.

I also often wondered where the VRML pioneers went. One of them is Mark Pesce, whom I've just discovered through this post called "Trust, But Verify". It's of note for two reasons.

First, it's well written, and worth reading for that alone. But secondly, because it touches on what is becoming a key issue in the Web 2.0 world, that of trust. Trust - and reputation systems - lie at the heart of openness. It's a subject of particular interest to me, and I'll be writing more about it here and elsewhere in due course.

Crimes in High Places

The ability of blogs to pick up on stories that the mainstream media miss or choose to ignore is by now well known; less remarked upon is the fluidity of the blogging world - the fact that a blog can comment on anything, even apparently far beyond its area of specialism.

A case in point is this post on Get Outdoors - "Everything you need to GetOutdoors". Hardly the place where you'd expect to find material headed "Chinese Troops Gun Down Tibetan Refugees". What's even more remarkable, though, is that this story, of international importance given China's continuing denial of human rights abuses in Tibet, is only now being picked up by the traditional outlets, who somehow overlooked it the first time around.

All power to the blogging elbow.

Update: The BBC has now picked up on the story, and is running a video showing the events. Interestingly, the clip was first shown on a small video sharing site in Romania - further proof that Web 2.0 is starting to trump MSM 1.0 these days.

EUPL: European Union Public What?

Here's one that completely passed me by: the European Union Public Licence. There's a very full discussion of why the EU is doing this, as well a rather sceptical comment from the FSF on the subject. But probably the best place to go for a succinct discussion is this one from Matt Asay, which is where I came across the idea in the first place.

Fear of the Dual Boot

This post raises a good point: people's reluctance to set up a dual-boot GNU/Linux and Windows machine. Unfortunately, this reluctance is absolutely justified. I've set up dozens of them, and they nearly always go pear-shaped.

That's partly why I love live CDs: you get all the benefit of a dual-boot system, without the risk. Even better, you can keep swapping in different ones to produce various kinds of systems. (Via Digg.com.)

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.