See Viv Run

Yes:

The European Union's telecommunications watchdog has called for regulators to take a backseat in setting standards--and allow consumers to take the lead by picking the platform that offers the services they want.

Speaking on Monday here at the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference, Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media, said regulators should no longer be the main force in charge of mandating standards.

...

Reding said the spectrum freed up by the switch to digital TV will offer a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for expanded wireless services, adding that regulators must be flexible and "get out of the command-and-control system."

Now, if we could possibly make that liberated spectrum into a commons....

Climate Commons

A new one for the commons collection:

Climate commons is a networked conversation space that creates a cross-disciplinary platform for planetary ecological concerns. Twelve people who research issues relevant to the arctic and climate change contribute the progress of their investigations and reflections from October 10, 2006 through January 10, [2]007. These networked conversations can be read by and contributed to by visitors to the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary art Boston or on the web at climate-commons.net.

It also offers some open source-y goodness:

Matt Shanley has created three main visual tools to help foster the dialog on this site.
The word count history graph uses sparklines to give you an idea of the ups and downs of site activity at a glance.
The hexagraph provides a spatial representation of the threads of a conversation. You can literally see when a conversation branch is bursting at the seams.
Category highlighting reveals common threads by illuminating the key words.

Each of these extensions will be released as an open source project in early 2007, around the time Climate commons is coming to completion.

I have to say, though, that there is something vaguely jarring about a project to do with climate change, sustainability and all that coming to "completion": shouldn't it just go on and on? (Via WorldChanging.)

Thanks - I'll Pass on that Poisoned Chalice

Good news, you might think:

Novell today announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, maybe not.

The code may well be released as open source, but there's the small matter of patents they might draw upon. Given that "Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others", there must be the fear that to produce these undeniably handy translators Novell has availed itself of some inside knowledge kindly provided by that nice Mr Ballmer.

I've no idea whether that happened or not, but if I were in the OpenOffice.org group I do know I'd be refusing the proffered chalice - just in case. (Via LWN.net.)

Time to Praise Simão Jatene?

In these dark days when everything seems to be getting worse with the environmental commons, it is rare to come across something as positive as this:

Vast tracts of rainforest in Brazil are to get a new protected status.

The segments of land in the northern Para state together cover 16.4 million hectares (63,320 sq miles), an area of land that is bigger than England.

Thousands of wildlife species inhabit the pristine forest, including jaguars, anteaters and colourful macaws.

Campaigners say the decision made by Para Governor Simao Jatene is one of the most important conservation initiatives of recent years.

If it is true, then Governor Jatene deserves to go down in the annals as a wise and great man. The only trouble is, I can't find anything confirming this wonderful news on the site of one of the organisations quoted in the story above. Instead, there is just a rather dry report on forest management.

Let's hope.

Of Kant and Cant

Sad to see the once-rigorous nation of Immanuel Kant falling for the, er, cant of the content industries in the copyright reform discussions:

But Jerzy Montag, Member of the Green Party opposition, sees this slightly differently. “The current reform draft is in some points friendly to industry and antagonistic to the interests of authors and creators,” he said. “We should give more rights to creators, but I am pessimistic here. And it makes me see red to think about how vehemently based on the current draft the CDU-SPD [Social Democratic Party] coalition wants to go after users.”

The target of Montag’s critique is a proposed change to establish criminal liability for illegal private copies. A mass complaint against 25,000 private users resulted in a clear statement of a court in Karlsruhe that it was unable to bear that load and therefore would not open proceedings in minor cases.

The German justice minister reacted with the introduction of a “bagatelle clause” into the draft proposal to limit criminal proceedings on commercial “pirates.” Yet after heavy criticism over legalising intellectual property theft from rights holders and some members of parliament, the minister withdrew the bagatelle clause (which refers to a minor case of no commercial relevance).

"Pirates", "intellectual property theft", and so on, and so on....

The Distro Xerxes Would Have Used

Here's one that famous blogger Mahmood Ahmadinejad probably prepared earlier:

Jalal Haji-Gholam-Ali who is a member of Sharif Technical University’s Advanced ICT Scientific Board and consultant of the ICT Ministry in launching the Persian Linux Project, reiterated, "Launching the Pilot Study phase of Persian Linux Project has be[en] commissioned to TCI’s Research Center."

...

Emphasizing that many of the main services of the ICT are Linux-based, he reiterated, "That ministry is determined to migrate towards Linux."

Referring to the establishment of an infrastructure Software Work Group at the Secretariat of the ICT Ministry, he said, "This work group is established aimed at facilitating the migration of the ICT Ministry towards full usage of Linux."

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

Ode to an Expiring Blue Frog

I suppose every frog has its day, but I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Azureus as we know and love it:

Azureus, maker of the popular peer-to-peer client, has revamped its software to include video publishing and distribution tools with a much slicker and user-friendly interface. To support the new platform, called Zudeo, the company has raised a $12 million second round of funding.

This space is hot; BitTorrent last week said it had raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management. Much like BitTorrent, Palo Alto-based Azureus incorporated, took venture money, and came up with a business model only after the massive success of its open source software.

After all, it's well known that bloat is bad for frogs and software.

Saint Johnomics

Sir John Sulston is one of my heroes, right up there with RMS. Indeed, Sulston can reasonably be called the RMS of genomics (or maybe RMS is the Sulston of software). More than anyone else, it was Sulston who fought for and won the free availability of the human genome's digital code. Without him, I suspect that the company that once seemed set to become the Microsoft of molecular biology, Celera, would "own" the human genome, with all the appalling things that this implies.

I mention this because there was short piece by him in the FT recently. It's an edited extract from a talk he gave; the editing and extraction are not very well done, and it certainly doesn't do justice to the man or his ideas. For that, you should read his book The Common Thread - significantly, subtitled "A Story of Science, Ethics and the Human Genome".

Great literature it ain't, but it fair bristles with the same sense of mission and moral imperatives that makes RMS's stuff such fun to read. If RMS is St IGNUcius, perhaps Sulston is St Johnomics.

Open Provenance Architecture

Interesting:

Ultimately, our aim is to conceive a computer-based representation of provenance that allows us to perform useful analysis and reasoning to support our use cases. The provenance of a piece of data will be represented in a computer system by some suitable documentation of the process that led to the data. While our applications will specify the form that such a documentation should take, we can identify several of its general properties. Documentation can be complete or partial (for instance, when the computation has not terminated yet); it can be accurate or inaccurate; it can present conflicting or consensual views of the actors involved; it can be detailed or not.

Open Science or Free Science?

The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):

should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?

Interestingly, there is another parallel here:

Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Brits Get the Net - and Net Ads

I remember well during the heady Web 1.0 days worrying about business models (I know, this made me something of an oddity). Because it was clear to me that the banner advertising then in vogue just wasn't going to cut it. Net advertising - it'll never catch on, I thought.

Close. Not.

The second Net boom/bubble has been largely driven by Google and its targeted ads. The knock-on effect is that Net advertising is thriving, and no more so than in the UK, apparently. This article has some interesting figures on the differences between the UK and US markets, tying them in to techno-socio-economic factors.

Towards a Post-Copyright World

One of the heartening things about fighting the inequities of the current system of intellectual monopolies is that there are a growing number of like-minded people and sites doing it. One, for example, is Moving to Freedom, and from here I learned about another, called Questioncopyright.org.

I can particularly recommend the essay there entitled "The promise of a post-copyright world". As well as a thorough, and unusually illuminating history of copyright (yes, it's all the fault of us Brits again), it closes with this important insight:

As the stream of freely available material gets bigger, its stigma will slowly vanish. It used to be that the difference between a published author and an unpublished one was that you could obtain the former's books, but not the latter's. Being published meant something. It had an aura of respectability; it implied that someone had judged your work and given it an institutional stamp of approval. But now the difference between published and unpublished is narrowing. Soon, being published will mean nothing more than that an editor somewhere found your work worthy of a large-scale print run, and possibly a marketing campaign.

Bill Gates's Virtual Wealth

Here's a very sharp post from Urizenus Sklar, which is a comment on Wagner James Au's post, which in turn was commenting on the news that Second Life has its first (dollar) millionaire:

Anshe Chung has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world.

As Au points out, Chung doesn't really have this million dollars: her ability to realise it is contingent on all sorts of factors:

If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over the span of a year or two to prevent market devaluation, and if all the assets actually in the inventory of various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if throughout that time the in-world economy remained stable and the population continued growing, and if Second Life did not suffer any serious interruptions of service either through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen acts of God-- why, Anshe Chung's account holder would have, at the end of that long and arduous process, well over $1,000,000.

But as Sklar brilliant notes, Bill Gates's wealth is equally chimerical and contingent:

If he started slowly selling his stock, but not so fast that the value tanked, and IF open source software doesn’t wipe him out before he sells and IF Google doesn’t wipe him out before he sells, and IF a lawsuit doesn’t wipe him out first, and IF his business doesn’t get dismantled for anti-trust violations, and IF he doesn’t get shot, and If as soon as he gets his money out he doesn’t put it in financial derivatives and they tank and IF as soon as he gets it out his wife doesn’t make him spend it on starving children in Africa before he gets to stuff his mattress with it, then I suppose he is a billionaire. But what are the chances of that?

Beyond the wit, what this post serves to underline is that there is no substantive difference between "virtual" wealth made in the "virtual" world, and "real" wealth made in the "real" world.

The Big IP Lie

A very interesting transcript of a conversation between Reuters and Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman. The latter is clearly trying to come across as a hip, reasonable chap:

Adam Reuters: How has the music industry, from production to marketing to distribution, changed in the MySpace, YouTube era we find ourselves in?

Edgar Bronfman: It really is all about the sense of community. There used to be a sense of community if you remember a really great record store where you could go through all the albums and talk about your records. Now you can have that sort of sharing in a virtual community or on an Internet community, and therefore do it much more broadly.

But later on, he is revealed for what he is when he slips in the Big IP Lie:

Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of an avatar or a song or any such thing. These are the creations of someone’s mind, and it’s property as real as real estate.

No, Ed, no, no, no. What you call "intellectual property" is really an intellectual monopoly: it is a limited privilege, granted by the state, to encourage creativity. It is not property, however much you might like to claim it implicity. It is a bargain, with a quid pro quo: it has to allow reasonable "fair use", and it has to be given up after a reasonable time. You and your industry seem to have forgotten both aspects.

Might I suggest you start talking about intellectual monopolies rather than "intellectual property" to help remind you about your obligations under this bargain?

Fight for Net and Mobile Neutrality

As if it isn't enough having to fight for Net neutrality, now it looks like in Europe we've got to do the same for Mobile neutrality:

This study undertaken by Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the UMTS Forum, considers the impact on mobile consumers and the overall industry ecosystem of two alternative spectrum management scenarios for wide area communications. Firstly, continuation of the current harmonised approach, which is based on internationally agreed band plans using a designated group of technology standards. Secondly, the liberalised scenario, which advocates flexibility through generalised technology neutrality.

The report concludes, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that consumers and the overall industry ecosystem are best served through continuation of the current harmonised approach. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that in a harmonised environment consumers benefit from the increased penetration of end-user services due to the speed of innovation and network effects (i.e. Metcalfe’s Law); while the industry ecosystem benefits from the improved cost structure provided by the large market size, and scale effects resulting from a harmonised environment. Finally, the quantitative analysis suggests that spectrum harmonisation will benefit end-users through greater usage of end-user services, at lower ARPU, with a larger consumer surplus.

So, a report commissioned by opponents of mobile neutrality - the "liberalised scenario" - comes out against it: what a coincidence.

But all the arguments in favour of Net neutrality - level playing field, the ability to introduce new services without asking permission from network operators etc. etc. - apply here too. Don't be fooled by this arrant nonsense: long live the wireless commons. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Enter the WikiMatrix

Confused by all the wikis out there? You will be, once you've worked your way through the dozens listed on this amazing site, which lets you compare them in minutest detail. (Via Quoi9.)

Brum Not So Glum

Some fine reporting from Matthew Broersma on Techworld has dug up some interesting stuff about the so-called "failed" open source desktop implementation in Birmingham:

Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.

The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.

Fishier and fishier - good work, Matthew.

Sun Opts for GNU GPL v2.5

I've written elsewhere about my pleasant surprise at Sun choosing the GNU GPL for Java. But an obvious question that follows on from that news is: which GPL? B

This is a highly political question, with no easy answer. And yet Simon Phipps, Mr Open Source at Sun, has given a good 'un:

the very first question Richard asked me about OpenJDK was "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2 only"? I explained that Sun could not in good faith commit to using a license sight-unseen for such an important code-base. It's used on 4 billion devices, there are more than 5 million developers dependent on it for their living, and the risk - however slight - that the GPL v3 might prove harmful to them can't be taken. So while we are very positive about the GPL v3, committing to using it when it's not finished does not seem responsible stewardship. I hope we can use it, but I can't express that hope by committing in advance. So for now, the Java platform will be licensed under just the GPL v2.

Sounds fair enough to me.

The Digital Library of India

There's plenty of noise in the press (and blogs) about the Google Book project, or the Million Book Project. These are all interesting and laudable (well, those bits of it in the public domain, at least), but what about elsewhere?

Here's an interesting piece about the Digital Library of India (DLI) initiative. Here, for example, is an issue I bet you've never considered before - I know I haven't:

Designing an accurate OCR in the Indian languages is one of the greatest challenges in computer science. Unlike European languages, Indian languages have more than 300 characters to distinguish, a task that is an order of magnitude greater than distinguishing 26 characters. This also means that the training set needed is significantly larger for Indian languages. It is estimated that at least a ten million-word corpus would be needed in any font to recognize Indian languages with an acceptable level of accuracy. DLI is expected to provide such a phenomenally large amount of data for training and testing of OCRs in Indian Languages. Many of the contents, besides scanned images, have been manually entered for this purpose. Using this extremely large repertoire of data, a Kannada OCR has been developed.

(Via Open Access News.)

Going All Googly on Copyright

Some people might say I already write too much about copyright; but for those who don't, and are dying for even more of the stuff, here's a blog on the subject. And not just any old blog (like this one); how's this for author credentials:

Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary; Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights; Law Professor Georgetown Law Center (adjunct), Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (full-time faculty member, founding director L.L.M in Intellectual Property program), author of numerous treatises and articles (including one on fair use with Judge Richard Posner), including a forthcoming multi-volume treatise on copyright.

The latter, by the way, is a cool 6,700 pages long.... (Via Against Monopoly.)

Dry Up, Epson

Time to stop buying Epson inkjet printers, it seems.

Finding Our Way to a Third Life

Talking of geography, here's geograph, which "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and Eire". That's nice, but I'd like to see this go further.

Imagine if pix were available for a much finer mesh - say, every ten metres (or something). Imagine, then, using some software like Photosynth, a seriously cool piece of software that is sadly closed source (and Microsoft's, to boot), to stitch all those images together into a complete, three-dimensional world - our world - that you could navigate through, while able to see everyone else there doing the same.

Third Life, anyone? (Via Open (finds, minds, conversations)...)

WAYN - Where Were You?

The Internet famously abolishes geographical location, but people are still located. This means that you often want to know where your family, friends and acquaintances are. Where Are You Now (WAYN) lets you provide your present and future locations for interested parties. It's an obvious idea - so obvious, in fact, that I wonder why it hasn't come along before. (Via Quoi9.)

Microsoft: Do You Have to Be So Blatant?

Massachusetts, we know, has had a troubled time when it comes to implementing ODF. But here's some fresh blood on the technical advisory group that will oversee that project. Oh, but wait a minute, who's this newcomer? Andy Updegrove has the details:

That person is Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs, and if that surprises you, it surprises me as well, given the degree of acrimonious debate and disinformation witnessed in Massachusetts over the last 15 months involving the Information Technology Division's transition to ODF.

Er, Microsoft? As in "not-really-keen-on-ODF" Microsoft? Isn't this a little bit, well, you know - blatant?

WordPerfect Does ODF - Finally

Still hedging its bets somewhat, Corel has finally done it:

Corel Corporation (NASDAQ:CREL; TSX:CRE) today announced that Corel WordPerfect Office will be updated to support new XML-based file formats, the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML).

Better late than never.