Open Source as Archaeology

An interesting thought about the modular design of free software:

We have observed a number of projects where software development is driven by the identification, selection, and combination of working software systems. More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components. These parts are then made to interoperate through wrappers and glue code. We think this trend is a harbinger of things to come.

Jeff Bezos' New New Thing - the Old Old Thing

Business Week gets uncharacteristically breathless about Jeff Bezos' amazing, risky, unheard, innovative, super-duper bet:

Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility.

Wow, Jeff, that's so totally, insanely, amazingly, utterly, far-outly, er, identical to an idea that IBM had four years ago:

IBM is laying down a $10 billion wager that business technology of the not-too-distant future will center on what it calls "computing on demand."

Maybe you and the Business Week team should go and take a nice long cold shower. Not together, you understand.

Chinese Whispers

A fascinating post by Stephen Walli about China and openness. As well as his comments about why it was inevitable that open source should thrive in China, there was this interesting tidbit:

China has its own document format standard called UOF. It is somewhat consistent with ODF. There is to be a convergence. I learned at dinner one night that Red Flag has already built UOF support into Red Office, so hopefully the support will rapidly ripple back out through the OpenOffice.org community and the rest of the ODF supporting products will soon support UOF as well.

Can you hear the sound of tomorrow?

Update: And here's some background to open source in China.

The Scalability of Virtual Fun

Linus may not scale, but maybe virtual fun does.

A Framework for Web Science

That's the title: as dull as ditchwater. The abstract sounds machine-generated:

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

But since it comes from Sir Tim, it is, almost by definition, important. At least it's all available online.

The Tragedy of the Fishy Commons

In the face of "a major scientific study" that finds

There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue

we have statements like this from the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations:

We have to be very careful about making grandiose, broad-brush predictions for 40 or 50 years and on a global scale also.

OK, let's not make any rigorous, scientifically-grounded, broad-brush predictions for 40 or 50 years and on a global scale, then: we'll just carry on depleting the stocks as if everything's fine until there's nothing left.

You see how easy it was to solve this fish stock problem thanks to the fine minds of the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations?

Mixed Messages from Microsoft

Understandably everyone is jumping up and down about Microsoft's announcement that it will be working with Novell. But for me, the key phrase is the following from Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer:

We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company.

Did you catch that? "Mixed-source" - it's clearly the Microsoft meme of the moment, as Microsoft tries yet again to get a grip on this spaghetti monster that is open source. In the past it's tried calling it "non-commercial" (as well as a few less complimentary things), and I predict that we're going to be hearing the phrase "mixed-source" quite alot - until they move on to something else.

Update: Here's a very shrewd analysis of what happened from Simon Phipps.

Wikipedia? - Old Hat. Try 3pedia.

This is my kind of thing:

3pedia is intended to be an editable encyclopedia whose articles describe technologies and applications that connect people in space, whether that space be real or virtual, as well as related subjects. I'm particularly interested in technologies that enhance the functionality of multi-user 3D online spaces, but a much broader range of articles is welcome.

DMCA = Destructive, Mean, Crazy, Asinine

A nice round-up of recent DMCA-related events that demonstrate what a bad law this is. Not so much for its intent, which was bad, as for its effects, which are worse.

MySQL: My, My, My

This post notes that the site www.mysql.com is now in the Alexa 500. Although Alexa is a deeply-flawed measure - it's biased against GNU/Linux systems for a start - it's a measure of sorts. But what is really fascinating is this comment:

Interestingly enough, there are tons of MySQL powered websites among the top 500 including Yahoo, Google, YouTube, WikiPedia, Amazon, Craigslist, AOL, Flickr, Mixi.jp, Friendster, The Facebook, LiveJournal, Digg, CNet, Weather.com, TypePad, Neopets, WebShots, Slashdot, GoDaddy, NetFlix, iStockPhoto, Travelocity, Lycos, PriceGrabber, FeedBurner, CitySearch, Evite and more.

It's not just Apache that's running the Web.

Five Stars for the Stern Report

WorldChanging has a splendid review of the Stern Report, giving it an unequivocable thumbs-up. It also pulls out a subtle but important facet: the report's ethics.

Actually, it's important to underscore that the ethics in this report are mostly not arcane -- even though those arcane aspects reflect, I think, a tectonic shift in economics that the Stern Review is helping to solidify. Climate change is forcing economists to think differently. In fact, I think climate change will one day be credited with having knocked some sense into the discipline of economics.

As I've noted many times on this blog, this kind of change is needed in order to understand and appreciate justly all the commons, not just that of the world's atmostphere.

The Creative Commons Ecosystem Up Close

Larry Lessig has a nice example of how CC materials can feed off each other in all sorts of creative ways. In this case, the result is the aptly-named "C-shirt".

Collaborative, Interactive, Open Music

One of the problems with open content is that it's hard to work on it collaboratively and interactively in real time, rather than simply sequentially. This is largely a question of tools: there just aren't any. Well, there weren't: it looks like netpd is a neat distributed open source solution. (Via Futurismic.)

Open Source Fabbers

People whose opinion I respect think that 3D printing machines, which allow you to "print" an object in layers, just as ordinary printers allow you to output images a dot at a time, are going to be big. As in enormous. So clearly it's important that such "fabbers", as they are also known, are available to all and sundry, to use in any way they want. Which also means, by implication, that we must have open source fabbers.

Happily, there's already such a project:

Fab@Home is a website dedicated to making and using fabbers - machines that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. This website provides an open source kit that lets you make your own simple fabber, and use it to print three dimensional objects. You can download and print various items, try out new materials, or upload and share your own projects. Advanced users can modify and improve the fabber itself.

Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefuly depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques. A fabber can allow you explore new designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly - set your ideas free. Just like MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.

While several commercial systems are available, their price range - tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of dollars - is typically well beyond what an average home user can afford. Furthermore, commercial systems do not usually allow or encourage experimentation with new materials and processes. But more importantly, most - if not all - commercial system are geared towards making passive parts out of a single material. Our goal is to explore the potential of universal fabrication: Machines that can use multiple materials to fabricate complete, active systems.

Sounds positively, er, fab. (Via Open the Future.)

Saving the Academic Commons from Enclosure

Another thought-provoking piece from OnTheCommons, this time about the academic commons and the threats it faces:

One of our most valuable commons are universities: a special non-market system for generating reliable and valuable knowledge. This is precisely why so many businesses are trying to privatize the academic commons.

...

One way that academia can begin to fight back, I believe, is by developing a stronger, more coherent analysis for why its open sharing and collaboration represent a “value proposition.” The academic commons is at least as generative as the market, but you rarely hear that stated or explained. Until it is, administrators and even many professors are likely to see more value in cold, hard cash than in the norms and ethics of the academic commons.

50 Bits and Bobs about Open Source

Well, that's what I'd call it: the blog prefers "50 Open Source success stories in Business, Education, and Government". It's a bit of a ragbag, but an interesting one in places, and useful for giving to people who seem to think that Apache is open source's only success. (Via Digg.)

From eMusic to ewMusic

I thought these people were the good guys?

Intellectual Monopoly Manumission

It was a custom for Romans, in their wills, to free some of their slaves. Neil Gaiman's post about problems with intellectual monopolies after the death of a writer prompts me to suggest a similar manumission for their works. It would be simple to arrange and a fitting point at which to liberate creations. (Via Copyfight.)

The European Computer Driving What?

The European Computer Driving Licence is not a joke, despite its Monty Python-ish name. More to the point:

The ECDL Foundation will now include a module on the use of Sun's Star Office Writer, Calc and Base applications for word processing, spreadsheets and database work.

So, shame on me that I've never heard of it, and good on them for creeping out from under the Redmond shadow, albeit only a smidgeon.

Here's the Jot - Where's the Tittle?

So, Google has bought JotSpot, and adds wikis to its growing collection of office tools. Who's next?

A Triptych of Science Opens

Here's a man after my own heart:

I've never had an idea that couldn't be improved by sharing it with as many people as possible -- and I don't think anyone else has, either. That's why I have become interested in the various "Open" movements making increasing inroads into the practice of modern science. Here I will try to give a brief introduction to Open Access to research literature; in the second instalment I will look at ways in which the same concept of "openness" is being extended to encompass data as well as publications, and beyond that, what a fully Open practice of science might look like.

(Via Open Access News.)

DRM.info - not about Digital Rights Management

An entire site about Digital Rights Management sounds like some torture from the Spanish Inquisition. But the fact that DRM.info is not a site about Digital Rights Management but Digital Restrictions Management gives a clue as to why its rather more tolerable: it's not exactly for the idea.

It comes from the Free Software Foundation Europe, and is designed presumably to catalogue the deletorious effects of DRM, offering them up as a warning and stimulus to remedial action.

Larry, to (Verb)

An interesting post from Mr Carr, notable as much for its title - "Larrying Wikipedia" - as for the idea it encapsulates:

Why, in other words, hasn’t anyone done to Wikipedia what Larry Ellison last week did to RedHat?

An (Open) Source of Endorphins

Somewhat belatedly, scientists are localising the physical basis for the kind of altruism that lies at the heart of the opens:

They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain's reward centre—the mesolimbic pathway, to give it its proper name—responsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.

Via Technocrat.

Cory's Big Idea

Cory Doctorow has given some details about a course he is running:

an undergrad class about DRM, EULAs, copyright, technology and control in the 21st century, called "Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?"

No, wait, even if you can't stand the Cory.

The course itself is pretty conventional. But this, frankly, seems brilliant:

The main class assignment is to work through Wikipedia entries on subjects we cover in the class, in groups, identifying weak areas in the Wikipedia sections and improving them, then defending those improvements in the message-boards for the Wikipedia entries.

What if every university course did the same, tidying up Wikipedia entries that were sub-par? Think about it.