All That Jazz

This looks an interesting project:

The Jazz research project seeks to extend the Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) software development environment with collaborative capabilities to support coordination, communication, and awareness among a small close-knit team of developers. This involves creating connections to server infrastructure for messaging, awareness, and source control, building hooks into the Eclipse development environment to supply awareness of the developers' interactions with source code and source control, and integrating user interfaces for communication and awareness within the Eclipse environment to provide unobtrusive access to in-context team information.

Let's hope that this Jazz does better than the earlier one from Lotus (which was bought by IBM):

Lotus Jazz was an office productivity suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985 for $595, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC. It was a commercial failure due to its low quality and aggressive competition.

Ah yes, I remember it well....

Steve Ballmer on Open Source

I am always amused - and slightly annoyed - that so much space is devoted to the wit and wisdom of Steve Ballmer, because basically he has none. That is, his words are pure marketing-speak, full of the right phrases, but signifying nothing. But at least in this FT interview, there's some interesting information about how Microsoft understands the open source challenge:

The biggest competitive challenges that any business faces is actually alternate business models. It is not a company. If you tell me somebody wants to come compete with us and do software in an area where we compete, or that we are going to get in a new area and it’s the same business model, it’s selling software, I know we can do it.

When somebody comes with a different business model, that’s where you get… or a phenomenon comes with a different business model.

What was the number one different business model that our company has confronted in the last six years? It’s Open Source. Open Source is not a technology phenomenon; it is a business model phenomenon. Frankly speaking, exactly what that business model is, is still unclear.

But that is a different business model and we had to ask ourselves: What do we do to compete? And we wound up saying it’s all about value and total cost of ownership, and high performance computing is a good example. It’s about 30 per cent of Linux share, and we are saying: Hey look, this is actually an area where we can take a lot of share with the right innovation, and the right total cost of ownership.

We shall see, Steve.

O Brave New World

It's not every day that a new continent is announced.

Anyone for Open Source TreeCAD?

Just when you think there can't be any areas left uncolonised by free software, you discover treeCAD. (Via MMORPG.)

Not so Corny for the Mexicans

By embracing the NAFTA treaty, Mexico surrendered its corn output to the vagaries of the North American corn market. Now, all of a sudden, Americans want corn, lots of it. As part of a dubious strategy to make “cleaner” gasoline while rewarding Big Agriculture and farm states, the U.S. Government is shoveling huge subsidies to corn-based ethanol production. This new demand has bid up prices in the U.S. and caused acute corn shortages in Mexico, which in turn has tripled and quadrupled the price of tortillas.

Which just goes to show that "free" trade is neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.

British Library Closes Down Knowledge

As I feared, the close relationship between the British Library and Microsoft has led the former to start producing online exhibits locked into the latter's proprietary products:

Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to 'virtually' turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.

Turning the Pages 2.0™ runs with Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework version 3, on a broadband connection. We have detected that you do not have the necessary software. You may also need to check that your hardware meets the 'Vista Premium Ready' specification.

So instead of opening up access to knowledge, the British Library is now foisting Microsoft's closed source on its visitors. A sad day for a once-great institution. (Via The Reg.)

Peugeot Drives Off with 20K SuSE Desktops

Well, strictly speaking, it's "up to" 20K:

PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.

Still, a good win for SuSE - and for open source.

Of course, that pre-supposes there's no massive oily patch on the road ahead for the Microsoft-Novell "mixed-source" juggernaut.... (Via Open Sources.)

Barely Born, Vista Gets a Second Life

Well, I suppose this was inevitable; call it the Clash of Hypes: Microsoft Vista is being launched at ten locations in Second Life. And nothing wrong with that - although intriguingly, as Kitten Lulu points out:

4 out of 9 are places where you can find sex escorts, and there is also the Isle of Lesbos that is somewhat sex-related.
I guess they want to convey the idea that Windows Vista is sexy… but not free.

Me, I just feel sorry for the bloke "coolz0r", whose MS implant seems to be overheating with all the excitement:

What they have done is beyond all imagination.

Yikes! (Via 3pointD.com.)

MySQL's IPO: Hot News - or Maybe Not

Amazing news - MySQL is planning to go public:

after years of rumo(u)r the company is finally preparing to go public, joining a select group of open source vendors that have made it to the publicly traded markets.

Or maybe not quite so amazing, since Marten Mickos had already told me this last July during an interview for Linux Journal (page 74, January Issue, if you're interested, published in December 2006):

We're aiming for an IPO. We're actually aiming for an independent existence and to do that you need to do an IPO, but the IPO is not the aim, the IPO is just a step. People say: What is your exit plan? and we say that we're not going to exit.

Go to Jail; Do Not Pass Go

At a time when this is happening:

The jail system is in "serious crisis" with overcrowding affecting rehabilitation of offenders, the chief inspector of prisons has warned.

Anne Owers said some jails have become "riskier places to manage" because of the overcrowding problem.

Do we really need this?

The European Parliament's committee for legal affairs meets today to vote on proposals for criminal penalties to be imposed on those who infringe intellectual property (IP) rights.

The vote today will determine whether or not a person who downloads a single unlicensed track of music could be sent to jail.

Think about it - because you can bet that most of the politicians won't....

Behind and Beyond Halloween

The publication of the first Halloween memo in 1998 was a pivotal moment in the history of free software. For the first time, it was clear that internally Microsoft was worried by this new threat, despite its outward-facing bravado and rhetoric.

Of course, there was no confirmation from the company that the memo was genuine, so there was always a theoretical possibility that they were faked in some way, although the internal evidence seemed overwhelming. But now, Groklaw reports, we have official proof of their genuine nature. The posting also offers an interesting meditation on how all this feeds into Microsoft's current attempts to "go legit" with the ECMA standardisation of its Office XML formats.

Not Drowning but Waving

Here's a clever idea, a Web site called goodbye-microsoft.com that doesn't just encourage you to install Debian alongside Windows on a dual-boot system, but actually does it for you, directly from the site, using your browser running on Windows as its starting point.

Wave good-bye as you go. (Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Enter the WeblogMatrix

For fans of matrices, here's another one: Weblogmatrix, which compares the main blogging platforms. (Via Quoi9.)

Aieee: It's IE8 (Internet Explorer 8)

Further proof that Firefox has changed the rules for browsers. It took Microsoft five years to move from IE6 to IE7, but there are already signs of an IE8 in the works.

At Your Service

It is no coincidence that services lie at the heart of companies based around open source:

In 2006, the share of the service sector in the global employment progressed from 39.5 per cent to 40 per cent and, for the first time, overtook the share of agriculture that decreased from 39.7 per cent to 38.7 per cent. The industry sector represented 21.3 per cent of total employment.

(Via Technocrat.)

'Omics - Oh My!

One of the fun aspects of writing my book Digital Code of Life was grappling with all the 'omics: not just genomics, but proteomics and metabolomics too. Here's what I wrote about the latter:

"Metabolome" is the name given to all the molecules - not just the proteins - involved in metabolic processes within a given cell.

And here's the big news:

Scientists in Alberta say they are the first team to finish a draft of the chemical equivalent of the human genome, paving the way for faster, cheaper diagnoses of disease.

The researchers on Wednesday said the Human Metabolome Project, led by the University of Alberta, has listed and described some 2,500 chemicals found in or made by the body (three times as many as expected), and double that number of substances stemming from drugs and food. The chemicals, known as metabolites, represent the ingredients of life just as the human genome represents the blueprint of life.

This does seem to differ from my definition, but hey, my shoulders are broad.
(Via Slashdot.)

GNU/Linux on the Desktop: Get the Facts

Some say that 2007 is the year GNU/Linux is going to make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. So instead of looking forward at what might happen, why not look back at what did happen?

Linux on the desktop grew and matured in 2006. While some analysts reported a slowing of Linux penetration on the desktop in 2006, a number of significant milestones were reached that promise to continue to move the Linux desktop ahead in 2007. As Gerry Riveros, Red Hat product marketing manager for client solutions put it, "What I think was most important [in 2006] were all of the 'under the hood' incremental improvements that took place around printing, plug-and-play support, laptop enablement and the arrival of the compositing manager that allows for modern graphics."

These and other improvements are setting the next stage of growth for the Linux desktop. A number of projects and teams have moved beyond alpha positioning and ownership to focus on how their efforts contribute to overall desktop Linux objectives. "In 2006, it appeared that developers were aware of how each other's projects help to accomplish the shared goals of all the projects," said John Terpstra, Advanced Micro Devices Linux Evangelist. Over 70 of the key desktop architects have met three times this year to agree on focus areas that would make desktop Linux "just work."

Open Healthcare

A new one to me:

1: What is “Open Healthcare”?

The nature of the Internet as a means of disseminating health media is changing. The first wave of online technology enabled organizations to extend their topdown, “command and control” communication methods to a new channel. But a new wave of open publishing technology now enables any individual, with or without professional training, to communicate with global audiences to share health-related information and opinions.

This communication occurs through multiple formats, including blogs, podcasts, wikis, message boards, videocasts, collaboration, community and review sites, as well as other forms of social media and peer-to-peer services. This grassroots media continues explosive growth with or without permission or endorsement from established healthcare institutions. Healthcare is entering a “New Era”, foretold by the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://cluetrain.com/), which greatly inspired this “open healthcare” movement.

(Via James Governor's Monkchips.)

Acceptable Intellectual Property

Although open genomics is one of the key areas of this blog, posts on the subject are few and far between. This is really a reflection of the fact that the whole area receives relatively little attention in the media. This makes articles that reflect on issues of openness and associated topics - notably intellectual monopolies - particularly welcome.

Here's one in the New York Times, which points to this very interesting paper entitled "Acceptable Intellectual Property":

Beginning in the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, decisions about intellectual property became visible and contentious public issues. A variety of actors—including many NGOs, academics, scientists, industry groups, and governments—now view decisions about intellectual property not as rational outcomes of an autonomous process of legal reasoning, governed by precedent and safely left to appropriate experts, but as political choices with profound stakes. Aside from a small band of libertarians, virtually no one contends that the answer is to dispense with intellectual property entirely. But there is a growing sense that the intellectual and institutional foundations of IP policy are too weak to manage its newly recognized political dimensions. Nowhere is this more true than in biotechnology, where controversies about the ownership of knowledge and biomaterials have generated profound public anxiety. This brief discussion paper outlines the sources of tension that animate these concerns and reflects on the capacity of existing institutions to reconcile them.

It's short, sweet and to the point: well worth reading. (Via Against Monopoly.)

Update: As so often is the case, the best commentary on this comes from Jamais Cascio, who also coins a fab neologism in this context:

Genetic Rights Management (GRM) is copy-protection for genes, a direct parallel to Digital Rights Management for CDs, DVDs, and other media.

Blogging Becomes Compulsorier

I think it's a great idea to force journos to roll up their sleeves and interact with their readers; but this may be taking it a little too far:

CNET is mandating that its blogging journalists respond to all reader comments and questions, according to a report in The Guardian. Further, they are also expected to get involved in every debate that "has legs." (Hat tip to Cyberjournalist)

Also, there is a teeny-weeny irony here, in that the Guardian's flagship blog, Comment is Free, rarely sees the posters (many of whom or journos) responding even minimally to comments (with a few honourable exceptions.)

Second Life and Africa

Here's an interesting point:

Many have observed that the African American economy in the US is probably bigger than even South Africa, a country recognised as the engine of Africa, with 47 million people and yet there is no visible connection between this economy and the rest of Africa for the world to notice.

Imagine everyone of us who are privileged to be connected could use our contacts and share them with our virtual friends in this Second Life and all of us can know each other through other people, how long will it take for us to create a social networking virtual space that we can collectively use to negotiate a better life for us and those connected to us.

One of the paradoxes of Second Life is that for all that it allows people to assume any identity they want, most of these turn out to be Caucasian (with a smattering of furries). As Second Life - or its successor - moves closer to the centre of online activity, the issue of bringing in developing nations and their related identities is one that will become ever more pressing if we are to avoid exacerbating the digital divide.

eBay Loses the Plot - and its Future

One thing that is evident online is that the line between real and virtual is increasingly evanescent (for the full half-hour argument, read Ed Castronova's thought-provoking Synthetic Worlds.) It follows that the companies that will thrive tomorrow are the ones that can seamlessly accommodate the sometimes disturbingly virtual alongside the comfier real.

Cross eBay off the list:

eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site. This includes currency, items, and accounts/characters

So, here's a question for all you entrepreneurs: who wants to become the eBay of 21st century? (Via Virtual Economy Research Network.)

Update: eBay has managed to find a couple of neurons, it seems.

Pentaho - Tally-ho!

Talking of opening up:

I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but Pentaho has gone 100% open source.

Thanks to moves like this, the open source enterprise stack gets richer all the time.

The Openness Spreads...to Adobe's PDF

One campaign I have fought over the years has been for people to dump proprietary PDF files and use open HTML instead.

Clearly, I lost that one, but as time goes by, it's becoming less of a problem as Adobe moves PDF closer to being a totally open standard like HTML. Here's the latest news:

Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and defacto standard to a full blown du jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First – others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols.

(Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Peter Suber's Purview

One source that crops up more than most in these blog posts is that of Open Access News. This is simply the best place to go for information about open access activity. But its creator, Peter Suber, does more than offer a handy one-stop shop for such news: he performs the equally important task of pulling together disparate pieces of information, to create a whole larger than the parts.

A case in point is this wonderful "raft" of blogger comments on the imminent FUD campaign against open access, where Peter kindly includes my own witterings on the subject. Reading this bundle of blog rage warms the cockles of my heart; it also offers a handy reminder of the moral and intellectual energy ranged against the retrograde forces of the anti-open access bloc.