OpenXML Translator (ODF Add-in for Word)

This may sound like a dull bit of code:

Open XML Translator provides tools to build a technical bridge between the Open XML Formats and Open Document Format(ODF). As the first component of this initiative, the ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 allows to Open & Save ODF documents in Word.

But it's actually a pretty important milestone. This is open source (BSD licence) code that has been sponsored by Microsoft - remember them? - so that Word can open and save documents as ODF.

Now, I'm sure it won't be perfect, but the fact that it exists, the fact that it nominally creates a kind of equivalence between Microsoft Office and ODF software is of huge importance: it means that selling ODF just became hugely easier, because most of the tired old arguments against it fall away. Now the alternative can be judged on their merits.

Help the Fight for an Open BBC

I seem to be writing lots of posts asking people for help with petitions and wotnot: sorry, here's another one. This time its about the BBC’s on-demand proposals.

I've only skim-read through the documents - the full proposals and the provisional conclusions - but it's clear there are two very important issues of openness involved. One is the obvious problem of DRM, the other, related, is support for non-Microsoft platforms. I suspect that it will be impossible to get people to do without the former at the moment, but I'm reasonably optimistic we can get them to commit to support for other platforms.

I urge anyone eligible - which essentially means fee-paying Brits - to comment before the deadline of March 28.

Microsoft's TCO Tricks: Ancient but Important

This may be ancient history now, but it's important that people remember that Microsoft does not fight fair, as these old documents about the company's TCO campaign against GNU/Linux indicate:

The court evidence also gives a peek into the relationships large vendors like Microsoft have with research firms. In a different Nov. 3, 2002, message, Houston said that the company had been unable to convince any other major research company to do the TCO study, and specifically mentioned Gartner as one that turned down Microsoft's request.

"We approached Gartner about doing this study and they declined," said Houston. "They said it was because they didn't know that their model for TCO would work well with Linux. I privately wonder if they want to take on this debate."

And the month before, Houston wrote Johnson a message that intimated pressure had been put on IDC to tweak the report so it would put Microsoft in a better light. "I hate to put it like this, but at this point, IDC is done negotiating with us. We have moved them quite a bit already, but they are now holding the line, saying that if we want the names of their 'big' analysts on the report, this is it."

Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2007

Because of this:

(1) Deciphering the sequence of the human genome and other advances in genetics open major new opportunities for medical progress. New knowledge about the genetic basis of illness will allow for earlier detection of illnesses, often before symptoms have begun. Genetic testing can allow individuals to take steps to reduce the likelihood that they will contract a particular disorder. New knowledge about genetics may allow for the development of better therapies that are more effective against disease or have fewer side effects than current treatments. These advances give rise to the potential misuse of genetic information to discriminate in health insurance and employment.

(2) The early science of genetics became the basis of State laws that provided for the sterilization of persons having presumed genetic `defects' such as mental retardation, mental disease, epilepsy, blindness, and hearing loss, among other conditions. The first sterilization law was enacted in the State of Indiana in 1907. By 1981, a majority of States adopted sterilization laws to `correct' apparent genetic traits or tendencies. Many of these State laws have since been repealed, and many have been modified to include essential constitutional requirements of due process and equal protection. However, the current explosion in the science of genetics, and the history of sterilization laws by the States based on early genetic science, compels Congressional action in this area.

Everybody needs something like this:

legislation establishing a national and uniform basic standard is necessary to fully protect the public from discrimination and allay their concerns about the potential for discrimination, thereby allowing individuals to take advantage of genetic testing, technologies, research, and new therapies.

And beyond "simple" discrimination, there's going to be stuff like this:

Consider a not-too-distant future in which personal genomes are readily available. For those with relations affected by a serious medical condition, this will conveniently provide them with any genetic test they need. But it will also offer the rest of us information about our status for these and other, far less serious, autosomal recessive disorders that might similarly manifest themselves in children if we married a fellow carrier.

A bioinformatics program running on a PC could easily check our genomes for all genes associated with the autosomal recessive disorders that had been identified so far. Regular software updates downloaded from the internet - like those for anti-virus programs - would keep our search software abreast of the latest medical research. The question is, how potentially serious does a variant gene's effects have to be for us to care about its presence in our DNA? Down to what level should we be morally obliged to tell our prospective partners - or have the right to ask about?

And just when is the appropriate moment to swap all these delicate DNA details? Before getting married? Before going to bed together? Before even exchanging words? Will there one day be a new class of small, wireless devices that hold our personal genomic profile in order to carry out discreet mutual compatibility checks on nearby potential partners: a green light for genomic joy, a red one for excessive recessive risks?

Given the daunting complexity of the ethical issues raised by knowing the digital code of life in detail, many may opt for the simplest option: not to google it. But even if you refuse to delve within your genome, there are plenty of others who will be keen to do so. Employers and insurance companies would doubtless love to scan your data before giving you a job or issuing a policy. And if your children and grandchildren have any inconvenient or expensive medical condition that they have inherited from one side of the family, they might like to know which - not least, to ensure that they sue the right person.

Another group that is likely to be deeply interested in googling your genome are the law enforcement agencies. Currently, DNA is used to match often microscopic samples found at the scene of a crime, for example, with those taken from suspects, by comparing special, short regions of it - DNA "fingerprints". The better the match, the more likely it is that they came from the same individual. Low-cost sequencing technologies would allow DNA samples to be analysed completely - not just to give patterns for matching, but even rough indications of physical and mental characteristics - convenient for rounding up suspects. This is a rather hit-and-miss approach, though, where success depends on pulling in the right people. How much more convenient it would be if everyone's DNA were already to hand, allowing a simple text matching process to find the guilty party.

Nobody ever said digital DNA was going to be easy.

FOOGL (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GNU/Linux) Usability

First, we had the hugely-important, but horribly-named "Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector" report, and now we have the equally horribly-named tOSSad F/OSS Usability report.

Since this is actually about Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux, they should, of course, have called it the FOOGL Usability Report. Despite this monumental gaffe, it does include some very useful information about usability, traditionally viewed as free software's Achilles Heel:

The survey showed that the majority of respondents agree that all three products have sufficient number of features and are user-friendly in general. Among the positive features of Firefox and OpenOffice.org are their user-friendly graphical interfaces. These include menus with clear definitions and abbreviations, and logical navigation of the main and context menus. OpenOffice.org and Firefox was also considered to have a sufficient set of features and are easy to install.

Regarding GNU/Linux, the survey results show that in average there is a positive opinion among the survey respondents in terms of installation, information presentation, navigation and the overall impression from the operating system. Therefore it can be concluded that the more experience users have with GNU/Linux, the more positive is their opinion of it.

However, respondents also mentioned gaps in the usability area of these products. For some users, one of the GNU/Linux’s disadvantages is the difficulty of installation of hardware and the learning curve needed in the process of migration from the MS Windows interface. OpenOffice.org also has some issues with insufficient performance compared to MS Office, according to the respondents.

Apart from sole usability aspects, the survey discovered that there is a need for more information about which F/OSS programs represent alternatives to their commercial counterparts. The survey also showed that no charge and the GNU General Public License (GPL) remain the main reasons for switching to F/OSS products.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

A Climate of Desperation

Of course, the situation is serious, but at least we're not as desperate as this lot:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What a good idea: Rent-a-Scientist. (Via Digg.)

A Million Penguins: Novel or Not?

Well, it had to happen:

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

At least they chose a good title.

Of Philip Rosedale, God and Darwinism

Here's an entertaining piece of a biotech writer grappling with and finally grokking Second Life via biological metaphors:

I’m trying to wrap my barely evolved first-life brain around the idea of a virtual organism where I (or, more accurately, my imagination) am a gene (a bundle of code) and where my “second me” was brought to life by Philip Rosedale, who then cast me off to fend for myself, although within a system of rules he launched when the world began. These rules themselves are evolving. For instance, what is to be done about evil? Should people be allowed to hurt and kill others? Rosedale seems to be a benign God, with a baby face and an easy smile in his first life as a human. But can we be sure about this?

Linux Guitar Project

Community effort to design and construct an extremely functional electric guitar powered by Linux.

Great; er, exactly how will it be powered by GNU/Linux?

Scooped on the Chief Lizard Wrangler

There's a great feature in Inc. about Firefox and its boss, the self-styled Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, whom I interviewed for Rebel Code many moons ago.

Unfortunately, I can't say I really enjoyed it: I was an email away from writing something similar myself....

Radio Spectrum More Valuable Than Oil?

Hm, now here's a thought:

Martin Sims, of the UK organisation Policy Tracker, asked the regulators and ministers in attendance to ponder if radio spectrum is as important for economic growth in the 21st century, as oil was in the 20th century.

Does that mean soon we'll have wars fought over wavelengths? And what are the implications for the open spectrum movement? (Via openspectrum.info.)

Getting Snappy About Snap

Here's someone who hates the Snap pop-up preview feature, as used on this blog. If it weren't easy to turn off (just click on Options and choose Bubble Opt Out), I'd agree, but given that it's effectively optional, is it a problem?

Views, anyone?

Today's Bio-hacker Heroine, Tomorrow's Hope

There are so many threads here:

What could be a life-saving breakthrough in the fight against cystic fibrosis, cancer and AIDS has been achieved by a 17-year-old Indian-American student at the Mississippi Institute of Mathematics and Science.

...

the young scientist turned to Ayurvedic medicine. Madhavi, who was born in India, spent a great deal of time watching her grandparents, who were practitioners of the traditional Indian healing techniques. "I grew up learning a lot of that," she recalls. "They've used it so much that I know it has some effect. They wouldn't have used it for centuries if it didn't. So I decided to try that approach, and it worked."

...

While Madhavi could become a millionaire by patenting her work, she has something else in mind: making it openly available. She points out, "If I were going to patent this, the rights would have to be sold to a pharmaceutical company, and that would greatly increase the cost of the drug once it's developed. So to prevent that from happening, by publishing it, the information becomes readily available and any company that wants to manufacture it, would be able to. So the price would be much lower due to competition and the people who need it most will have access to it."

There is the young bio-hacker, blissfully unaware that what she is doing is hard; there is the ancient medical commons, used, not plundered; there is an understanding that patents, that should open knowledge, often lock it up; and above all, there is a compassion and altruism that gives us hope for the future.
(Via Technocrat.)

WTF is WTF?

Dave Sifry has always been one of the do-ers in the world of computing. And as someone who has been at the heart of open source for over a decade, he can be counted on to be plugged into hot trends.

His latest wheeze, Where's The Fire? or WTF? - a play on the acronym WTF? - ought, by rights, to be really sizzling, and not just because of it's name:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere.

...

You can also write a WTF on any topic that someone would search for, and provide information and resources to them about that topic or subject. So, you might want to write a WTF about yourself or your friends names, or your company (or maybe even your competition!)

If you think that you've got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

As this indicates, WTF? hopes to tap into the power of both Digg and Wikipedia: user-generated, explanatory content that is voted up or down by peer review. At the moment there's not much there, and it seems to me that there's a crucial piece missing from the WTF idea.

The "blurb", as the basic unit of WTF is called, resides on Technorati's servers, not the blurber's: this means that blurb authors receive no compensation other than "glory". Unless there is some Technorati-juice being dispensed in the form of built-in links to the blurber's blog (and not just ones added gratuitously), I fear that most of the better bloggers will just say: "WTF?".

Second Life in a Box: OpenSim

The recent opening up of the Second Life Viewer code was big news, but the thing that everyone is waiting for is for the server-side stuff. Well, that may be a while off - see my interview with Cory Ondrejka for some more background on this. Meanwhile, though, the libsecondlife group has taken under its wing the OpenSim project, which as the home page puts it laconically:

OpenSim is a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

This is great news, because it means that people can start developing other Second Life-like virtual worlds, completely independently of Linden Lab. It will also mean that people can start to explore some of the thorny issues of multiple, compatible virtual worlds now.

Conservation Commons

A little while back I was urging you to sign a petition calling for open access in the European Union (you did sign, didn't you?). Now here's another worthy cause, asking for open access to environmental information - the ultimate, double commons:

Principles of the Conservation Commons

Open Access: The Conservation Commons promotes free and open access to data, information and knowledge for all conservation purposes.

Mutual Benefit: The Conservation Commons welcomes and encourages participants to both use these resources and to contribute data, information and knowledge.

Rights and Responsibilities: Contributors to the Conservation Commons have full right to attribution for any uses of their data, information, or knowledge, and the right to ensure that the original integrity of their contribution to the Commons is preserved. Users of the Conservation Commons are expected to comply, in good faith, with terms of uses specified by contributors.

You can sign up online. See you there. (Via Open Access News.)

iHavenosenseofhumour

Catch it while you can.

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.)