From Ransom Love, With Love

One thing I could never understand about the whole SCO affair is how the people at Caldera, which took over SCO, could be in any way part of the mess. And now comes this from the ever-diligent Groklaw:

Here's Ransom Love's Declaration [PDF] as text, which he has provided to IBM, another of the 597 exhibits IBM has offered in support of its summary judgment motions. I want to thank Laomedon for doing the work.

Love was the CEO of Caldera prior to Darl McBride. And he tells the court about Caldera when it was a Linux company, about the Santa Cruz assets acquisition, a bit about Novell, where he worked before starting Caldera and worked on the Corsair project, and about his view of SCO's claims regarding header files. He didn't have to do this declaration. It's voluntary, unlike a deposition, and that speaks volumes right there.

He thrusts a dagger right into the heart of SCO's claims. I see no way to recover from his declaration, because there is no one who can convincingly contradict. He was the CEO, the co-founder of the company to boot. Who can possibly know more than he does about the history of the company, what it did with Linux, its striving for POSIX compliance, and particularly whether the company knew about the header files being in its own distribution of Linux that SCO claims are infringed? Even if SCO were able to trot out Bryan Sparks, the other co-founder, Sparks was not CEO at the time of the Santa Cruz acquisition. There is no one but Love to testify at this level. Love has done the honorable thing and told the truth. I take my hat off to him.

Me too. When I interviewed him for Rebel Code, he seemed a very decent chap. This latest twist in the sorry SCO saga confirms that view.

Fork Your Data

Eric says:

The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.

Nothing like the threat of a fork to keep 'em honest. (Via Slashdot.)

Skulduggery at WIPO

An interesting leaked document shows how the intellectual monopoly bullies (the EU, US and Japan with a few hangers-on) are trying to undermine any good work that WIPO might be minded to do under the influence of developing countries. Clearly still a long way to go on the WIPO front. (Via Boing Boing.)

An Open Letter to Our Tone

Yup.

UOFology

Andy Updegrove has a fascinating post about the Chinese document format UOF:

It's called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it's been in development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in December of last year. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications. Like both ODF and OpenOffice XML, it is another "XML in a Zip file" format.

And he points out:

Implementation of UOF will continue the trend away from proprietary, "lock in" products, and towards an environment with more competition, more variety, and more freedom for end-users. Presumably, the proliferation of compatible open format alternatives will place added pressure on OOXML to become increasingly open and competitive in order to be relevant. Whether that will be sufficient to offset the appeal of alternative (and often cheaper) office suites implementing ODF and/or UOF remains to be seen.

Open Source DIY

I hate DIY.

No, really: I really, really hate DIY. So the idea of a site devoted to the damn subject is pretty appalling. Except that Instructables has a clever twist (otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it): this is a kind of collaborative, open source DIY, where people share their DIY ideas, tips and secrets, and others make suggestions for improvement or just generally comment on things.

It's a nice idea. But a better one would be where somebody else came around to your house and did it for you. Now that's what I call real collaborative DIY. (Via TechCrunch.)

When the Picture Changes

I've written about Riya a few times. It's visual search technology is interesting; alas, it hasn't turned out to be very profitable, because the people behind it are changing direction somewhat. They've just launched Like.com, which seems to be a specialised accessories search engine for people with more money than taste.

What I do admire, though, is the way the company's founder, Munjal Shah, has put the ecstasy and agony of the transmogrification of Riya into Like in his blog for all to see and learn from. It's both brave and generous, and I salute that.

Pity about the new company, though.

It's the Info Commissioners Squad

I don't know how much practical effect this will have, but it's a nice idea:

A group of international data and privacy protection commissioners has decided to act together to challenge the surveillance society which they claim is developing. Commissioners from the UK, France, Germany and New Zealand will adopt common policies.

At the annual Conference of Data Protection and Information Commissioners, held last week in London, a joint set of objectives was adopted by the international commissioners aimed at tackling what they see as a growing international issue of constant citizen surveillance.

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).

...

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.

...

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.