All the Right Connexions

Even though MIT's OpenCourseWare is better-known, Rice's Connexions programme is arguably a more innovative and thorough-going example of the open courseware concept. For a start, it's based on the open source Rhaptos sofware, whereas MIT's is proprietary. But Connexions is also going further in terms of re-inventing education.

So, as well as its open courseware, it is making materials available as print on demand books, that can be individually customised. It hopes that this move will enable it to become self-sufficient, helped along the way by another grant from the enlightened Hewlett Foundation, which is driving much of the best work in open access and open courseware:

Connexions' initial revenue streams will come from the sale of books. In one case, Connexions plans to found a University Press Consortium that allows member presses to offer print-on-demand publication of money-losing monographs that are academically important but which simply cost too much to publish. The model builds upon Rice's announcement in July that it would use Connexions to revive its own university press, which was shuttered in 1996. The reopened Rice University Press published its first title, "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age," early this month (see http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1).

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Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books.

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Connexions' final revenue-generating plan involves licensing its platform to companies for in-house corporate training. This model will allow companies to slash costs for updating printed materials, particularly for large product lines, and Connexions' robust translation features will allow companies to easily convert courses and texts into other languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Japanese and Italian.

Kudos to Richard Baraniuk for initiating what is proving to be a hugely ambitious project. I wish it well.

Suite for Some

What's most interesting about Intel's new SuiteTwo is that nobody's done it before (at least to my knowledge). And yet the idea of bunging together a bunch of Web 2.0 apps and selling it to enterprises is pretty obvious, really. So obvious that I can't see much point unless the integration between them is something special, and it's hard to tell at this stage.

Squirl It Away - Forever, Please

A little while back I wrote about LibraryThing which lets you catalogue, tag and share information about your books. Obviously, it's a model that can be applied to other domains, and that's what the wittily-named Squirl has done. However, I'm not entirely sure we should be encouraging people to drag this kind of thing out into the harsh light of day.

Let My Music Go

There is a mini-disaster looming in the UK: the music industry wants to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings. It would be bad enough if they did this for the future, but the danger is that it might be applied retrospectively, taking music currently in the public domain, and locking it up for another couple of generations.

This is scandalously greedy, since extending copyrights will rarely benefit the original creators of the music: it is the music labels that usually own the copyrights. And it certainly won't encourage groups like the Beatles to write more classics, for the simple reason that they can't - a clear demonstration of the specious logic generally used to justify the copyright extension, that it will encourage more creativity.

Though the gains may be marginal and misplaced, the losses will be real and general. To fight this iniquitous situation, there's a new campaign: it's called Release The Music. If you want to find out about the copyright issues there's more on the site.

They say that a gentleman only supports lost causes, and so I urge you to support what is almost certainly a no-hoper given the current political climate and the influence the record industry wields. (Via Lessig's Blog.)

You Know Second Life is Real...

...when they start phishing for your passwords to steal your virtual money.

The Fabulous LiMux

The migration to GNU/Linux by the city of Munich has become a thing of fable ever since it was mooted, so it's good to get some hard facts on what exactly they're up to. There's no doubt that the LiMux project will be an important test-bed for making such a move. Let's hope it all works out.

Why Open Knowledge Will Ultimately Beat Closed

Because:

each user of the knowledge pool becomes a contributor back to the pool. As the pool grows it is ever more attractive to new users so they use (and contribute) to it rather than to any competing closed set of knowledge. This results in a strong positive feedback mechanism.

Open Source, Armenia and Duduks

Why did nobody tell me about this? I mean, they probably had open duduks, too.

Unreal Reality Shows in the Virtual World

So-called "reality" shows like Big Brother are, of course, unreal by virtue of their artificial situations. So the news that Big Brother is coming to Second Life, that most realistic of non-naturalistic virtual worlds is, in a way, simply surreal.

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.

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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.)