Open Source Disaster Management System

No, really: it's called Sahana. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

OA Book on OA from OA Publisher

As the Digg lot say, "title says it all" - or nearly: worth noting too that this open access book on open access comes from a publisher that provides open access to all its titles. (Via Open Access News.)

Copyright as a Metaphor for "Rip-off"

There's a piece on C|net which I can only hope was written with the express intent of provoking a reaction, since it's basic idea is so batty:

A European court last month agreed with a group of regional publishers in Belgium that accused Google of ripping off their content. The court ordered Google to remove text summaries of the newspapers' articles, along with Web links to the publishers' sites.

As world and dog have pointed out, what Google News does is provide free - yes, free - publicity for news sites, leading to free - yes, free - extra traffic, which can then be converted to what we in the trade call dosh. The idea that Google is somehow "ripping off" the poor old media conglomerates is risible. But luckily, they seem intent on slitting their own throats, so let 'em, says I.

More serious is the implicit assumption in the C|net piece that there is something sacred about copyrighted material. Maybe there would be, if copyright did what it was originally intended to do: to provide an incentive to the creator to create. But now that copyright typically runs for 50 or even 70 years after the creator's death, it's hard to see how new works are going to be conjured up except with a Ouija board.

Copyright has broken the original social compact, which is that people aren't allowed to copy it for 14 years - yes, 14 - in return for being allowed to do what they like with it afterwards. As copyright is extended time and time again, it is becoming impossible ever to access the content it covers: there is no quid for the quo.

So copyright has become the "rip-off", demanding without giving. If media companies really wanted to stop people using their materials, they should go back to a balanced copyright that gave to both parties. The current system is so inequitable that it is no wonder most people feel morally justified in ignoring it.

On Sharing and Fake Sharing

Larry Lessig has some wise words on what Flickr gets right and YouTube gets wrong.

IE7: Mossberg and the Fox

I've not really been following the IE7 saga, since it seems to be a case of too little too late. I was pleased to find my prejudices confirmed by the Grand Old Man of populist tech journalism, Walter Mossberg:

The new Internet Explorer is a solid upgrade, but it's disappointing that after five years, the best Microsoft could do was to mostly catch up to smaller competitors.

Quite.

Kudos to Kocoras and ICANN

Looks like I was overly pessimistic about the Spamhaus case:

On 19 October 2006, United States District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras, presiding over the e360Insight v. The Spamhaus Project matter in the Northern District of Illinois, issued an order denying e360Insight's ("e360") motion asking the Court to, among other things, suspend www.spamhaus.org. The Court explained that the relief e360 sought was too broad to be warranted under the circumstances. First, the Court noted that since there is no indication that ICANN or Tucows acted in concert with Spamhaus, the Court could not conclude that either party could be brought within the ambit of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(d), which states that an order granting an injunction is "binding only upon the parties to the action, their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and upon those persons in active concert or participation with them." Second, the Court stated that a suspension of www.spamhaus.org would cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, not just those that are in contravention of the injunction the Court previously issued against Spamhaus.

Kudos to Kocoras for his intelligence, and to ICANN for not rolling over as I feared they would.

It's the Big 1 - 0 - 0 - 0

This is my thousandth post.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Er, that's all, really.

Thanks for your attention.

Plone Goes Pltwo...

...as in Second Life:

The Plone Foundation announced today the broadcasting of the Plone Conference 2006 into the virtual world Second Life. It is the first big open source conference being colocated inside a virtual world. The event will be held from Oct 25-27

"We'll broadcast selected talks and tutorials each day into a virtual conference building inside Second Life. Residents who could not make it to the by-now sold-out conference can participate in virtual form. A back channel for their questions to the actual speaker will be provided, too"

And so the boundaries between RL (real life) and SL (Second Life) became just that tiny bit more friable....

Sun Supports OpenOffice.org - No, Really

It might seem strange to talk about Sun supporting OpenOffice.org - after all, it was the original donor of the code to the open source community. But what's changed is that it is now offering service plans for the software: this is news, because in the past it has only supported its own variant, StarSuite.

This is also important, because it provides a safety net to companies and government departments who want to use OpenOffice.org. In the past, they have been forced to opt for StarSuite if they wanted support; no longer.

Well done, my Sun.

All Hail the ODF Alliance

The ODF Alliance has been going for a while now, but even so this list of 300+ members is a forceful reminder that this is a standard that is getting stronger day by day. (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

The Evolution of Academic Knowledge

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online. This is certainly an important moment in the evolution of academic knowledge, since it points the way to a future where everything will be accessible in this way - call it the Googleisation of academia.

A pity, though, that the terms of use are so restrictive: not a CC licence in sight. Obviously we're still at the Neanderthal stage as far as copyright evolution is concerned.

The Integrated Open Source Stack Meme

I noted previously that Red Hat has blessed the idea of the integrated open source stack; now Novell is doing the same, with the support of IBM.

And the meme marched on.

Casing Citizendium

Citizendium, Larry Sanger's Wikipedia fork, is opening its doors, albeit in a very controlled sort of way, as a private alpha. At least the press release - characteristically lengthy - sketches in some of the details as to who is doing what with this interesting project. I'll be writing more about this in due course.

Will Lack of Open Access Wipe Out the World?

A few months ago, I asked whether lack of open access to avian 'flu data might hinder our ability to head off a pandemic; now it looks like lack of open access could lead to the destruction of civilisation as we know it. If that sounds a little far fetched, consider the facts.

The US is the largest single polluter in terms of carbon dioxide: according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, "In 1997, the United States emitted about one-fifth of total global greenhouse gases."

The EPA plays a key role in determining the US's environmental actions: "the Agency works to assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies; and provide leadership in addressing emerging environmental issues and in advancing the science and technology of risk assessment and risk management."

To "assess environmental conditions and to identify, understand, and solve current and future environmental problems; integrate the work of scientific partners such as nations, private sector organizations, academia and other agencies" clearly requires information. Much of that information comes from scientific journals published around the world. Unfortunately, the EPA is in the process of cutting back on journal subscriptions:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is sharply reducing the number of technical journals and environmental publications to which its employees will have online access, according to agency e-mails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). This loss of online access compounds the effect of agency library closures, meaning that affected employees may not have access to either a hard copy or an electronic version of publications.

...

In addition to technical journals, EPA is also canceling its subscriptions to widely-read environmental news reports, such as Greenwire, The Clean Air Report and The Superfund Report, which summarize and synthesize breaking events and trends inside industry, government and academia. Greenwire, for example, recorded more than 125,000 hits from EPA staff last year.

As a result of these cuts, agency scientists and other technical specialists will no longer have ready access to materials that keep them abreast of developments within their fields. Moreover, enforcement staff, investigators and other professionals will have a harder time tracking new developments affecting their cases and projects.

So, we have the organisation whose job is to help determine the actions of the world's worst polluter cut off from much of the most recent and relevant research, in part because much of it is not open access.

No OA, no tomorrow, no comment. (Via Open Access News.)

Open Source Intelligence

Technocrat pointed me to this story on Village Voice, a title I used to read assiduously in my younger days. It's about how a network of planespotters have put together many of the pieces that go to make up the shameful jigsaw puzzle of the CIA's "torture taxi" operation, used for moving people around the world to be held and tortured without judicial oversight.

What's fascinating is the way that tiny, apparently meaningless contributions - a photo here, a Yahoo search of a plane number there - when put together, can help create something really big and important, just as open source projects pool the work of hundreds or thousands to create vast and astonishing achievements like GNU/Linux or Wikipedia.

An Ode to Unicode 5.0

Andy Updegrove has a short but justified paean to the wonder that is Unicode, one of the unsung heroes/heroines of the computer revolution. Apparently version 5.0 is now available. Don't all rush to buy a copy at once.

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.