Free Our Postcodes

Postcodes are something that should obviously be a commons - owned by and available to all. Instead, in the UK, you have to pay serious dosh to use them, with all sorts of inefficiencies. The obvious solution is to create an open postcode database, and that's what they're doing here. Pity I don't have a GPS device.

Prizes, Not Patents

I've written enough about why the patent system is broken; criticism is easy, but it's harder coming up with alternatives. Here's one: using prizes instead of patents. (Via Technocrat.)

ID Cards: Cracked in All Senses

And talking of ID cards, here's more bad news.

Update: And how could I leave out the inimitable Mr. Lettice's wise words on the subject?

Murder Will Out

Well, what a surprise:

In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer today declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc. earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."

And there we all were, thinking that Microsoft really wanted to be free software's best chum.

The Seed Gestapo

For millennia there has been a seeds commons - a shared store of seeds produced by farmers from this year's crop for the following year.

In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are set aside and used as seeds in the next planting season. There is a knack to choosing these. You want plump grains with no blemishes. Every farmer knows how to do it, and usually their families too.

And then:

It seems clear the government is working with the seed companies to strong-arm farmers into buying seeds instead of producing them themselves. So doing, it is paving the way for GMO seeds and the jackboot legal regime that comes with them. (In the U.S., Monsanto has sicced its lawyers on hundreds of farmers for “patent infringement”, often when the patented seeds in question simply blew into their fields.)

I, For One, Salute Our New Antiguan Overlords

Many martial arts are based on turning your assailant's power against himself. Sounds like the plucky Antiguans have taken a course or two:

If the United States remains recalcitrant [over its refusal to open up online gambling], under the WTO rules, Antigua would potentially have the right to suspend its own compliance with the treaty that obligates it to respect the United States' intellectual-property laws.

Go, Antigua, go.

No ID, No Comment

This is what will happen if you're not carrying the ID card that nice Mr Blair wants us all to have....

Open Earth

I came across this story about Whirlpool offering 3D models of its white goods for use in Google's Sketchup program. That's interesting enough, but it led me to explore Google's 3D Warehouse for that program a little, and I was frankly amazed how far things have come since I last looked at this area. For example, the Cities in Development area is full of detailed models of real buildings.

What's striking about this is that it is an example of Net-based collaboration on an open project - in this case, modelling the entire planet by placing these 3D models on Google Earth. Where this gets really interesting is when you start creating Second Life-like avatars that can move freely around that Virtual Earth, interacting away.... (Via Ogle Earth.)

Another View of the Opens

Here's a presentation by Jamais Cascio, a "foresight specialist", who despite his daft job title has put together quite a nice gentle trot through the opens. He gets most of it right, aside from the egregious clanger of calling Linux an operating system....

Digital Fish Wrap

There is a wonderful evolutionary winnowing process underway within the mainstream media: those that get the Internet are thriving, while those that don't, come up with ideas like this:

Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap.

See Darwin run. (Via Techdirt.)

We, the Undersigned...

Here's a slightly hopeful development. On the 10 Downing Street Web page (Tony Blair's official cyberhome), there's a new facility: e-petitions - kudos to Number 10 for adding this. Especially since the most popular petition is currently the following:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

So, if you're a Brit, do sign; the cynic in me says it's not going to make the blindest bit of difference, but hey, it's worth a try. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Update: The petition against ID Cards is also soaring away: you know what you need to do, O Britons!

Crumbs from Google's Bigtable

For a company that is so big and important, Google is remarkably opaque to the outside world (blogs? - we don't need no stinkin' blogs.) Any info-morsels that drop from the Big Table are always welcome - which makes this downright gobbet of stuff about Bigtable particularly, er, meaty:

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Get some while it's hot (and hasn't been taken down by the Google Thought Police.)

The Other Planet Solaris

Since Solaris is one of my favourite planets, and since I was less than generous the last time I wrote about OpenSolaris, I feel duty-bound to pass on the information that there is another Planet Solaris - Planet OpenSolaris, to be precise. (Via SunMink.)

The Problems of a Synthetic Biology Commons

Here's a fascinating paper:

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus "created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet." These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of "synthetic biology," the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level.

All good stuff, but there's a problem that may be of interest to readers of these posts:

synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now. It points out a tension between different methods of creating "openness". On the one hand, we have intellectual property law’s insistence that certain types of material remain in the public domain, outside the world of property. On the other, we have the attempt by individuals to use intellectual property rights to create a "commons," just as developers of free and open source software use the leverage of software copyrights to impose requirements of openness on future programmers, requirements greater than those attaching to a public domain work. Intellectual property policy, at least in the United States, specifies things that cannot be covered by intellectual property rights, such as abstract ideas or compilations of unoriginal facts, precisely to leave them "open" to all – the public roads of the intellect. Yet many of the techniques of open source require property rights so that future users and third parties will be bound by the terms of the license. Should we rethink the boundary lines between intellectual property and the public domain as a result?

Why Sun Mobilised the GPL Now....

Here's a fascinating analysis of why Sun went for the GPL and why now:

In summary, Sun opensourcing Java is all driven by mobile. The timing came from mobile. The license is due to mobile. Motorola, in my opinion, was the target, not IBM. I am a Java fan and I always will be. They were clearly late but maybe not too late. Let's see what happens next. This market is moving so fast, it will be interesting to watch... Once again, though, one thing is clear to me: mobile open source is king and it is gaining momentum every day.

Do read Fabrizio Capobianco's full post - it makes a lot of sense.

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

Trouble 't Mill - No, Really

This is not good - although it would be interesting to know what exactly went wrong. It may just be that the old GNU/Linux desktop just wasn't ready for what they wanted. (Via LXer.)

Google: Is That the Sound of Crying?

Google search is useful - my day revolves around it. But you'd be hard-pushed to claim it was cool anymore. On the contrary, it's archetypally a tool that you use and forget about.

But this is cool:

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories.

You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. Drag an mp3 into the OWL interface and you will be shown tracks that sound similar to the mp3 you provided. You can select a segment of a track to search on and of course you can limit your search to tracks with licenses that permit uses you require, e.g., commercial or derivative use.

Google, are you listening?

Is Sun Trying Too Hard to Be Good?

Not content with GPL'ing Java (for which they have my unalloyed admiration), Sun has now also given some dosh to Creative Commons.

What are they after - the Nobel Peace Prize?

Copycat: I Say "Tomato", and You Say "Tomato"

Ha!

MA Ma-Madness

Talking of lightning, I can't believe that the curse of Massachusetts has struck twice in the same place, but apparently it has:

In (another) sad day in Massachusetts, State CIO Louis Gutierrez submitted his resignation today to the Romney administration. Like his predecessor, Peter Quinn, Louis is a man of principle. And, like Peter, he is taking the high road by using his resignation to inform the citizens of Massachusetts of a regrettable lapse on the part of their elected representatives.

I suppose the only consolation is that if ODF succeeds here, with everything ranged against it, it will succeed anywhere.

Microfinancing Goes Open

Microfinancing - making small loans to many people, especially those traditionally unable to obtain loans - is about decomposing money: breaking it up into smaller bits for more efficient use. The same could be said about the distributed development technique employed by open source. So it's good to see the two coming together:

A Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has sparked the creation of an open source project to help build technology infrastructures for non-profit microfinance institutions. In developing countries around the world, these institutions loan small amounts of money to women who want to start businesses and create a better life for themselves and their families. The Mifos Software Initiative debuts this week at the Global Micro-Credit Summit in Halifax.

The Mifos Software Initiative has been created by the Grameen Foundation:

to address the microfinance industry’s information management challenge. The Mifos Initiative delivers an open source information management system for the global microfinance industry via a collaborative development and support community.

The Mifos Initiative is a new approach to technology that puts the control of technology in the hands of the MFI [microfinance institution]. The open source framework allows microfinance institutions to select locally based development and support services to assist with customization of their software, maintenance and implementation support services. Previously, this level of control could be met only by building and maintaining their own system, which is extremely expensive and therefore not accessible for most MFIs.

Feast of the Behemoths

There's no doubt that the three giants of the online world are Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. What they get up to matters, so tracking what they're doing in terms of acquisitions, say - and who they're doing - is a fruitful activity. The problem, is keeping track. Enter this rather nice draggable timeline, which shows who did what, when and to whom. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Top500 Supercomputers: Guess Who's Top?

The Top500 Supercomputer list is always fun, not least because it shows us where we will all be in a few years' time. There are all sorts of cuts of the main data, but the one you'll really be interested in is here; it shows that GNU/Linux ran a cool 75% of the Top500, and that a certain other operating system's share is so nugatory it's not even mentioned by name.

How Green Was My PC?

Not very, it seems.

This report contrasts the amount of electricity consumed, and carbon dioxide generated, by two approaches to school computing: one based on conventional PCs, the other on thin clients running open source. The difference is startling:

The Green Model therefore represents a 89% saving in the cost of electricity and a 78% reduction carbon dioxide emissions when compared to the Conventional Model.

And it's going to get worse:

The stated aim of many authorities is to have one computer per child. In addition the exponential growth of the interactive whiteboard in all education sectors is set to achieve one in every classroom.

Bearing in mind that an interactive board runs from a conventional PC with a 600w projector and that there are over 50,000 primary schools in the UK we can predict a ten fold increase in power consumption with concomitant carbon increases over the next five years.

Serious stuff that merits thought and action, quickly.