The Other OSS Stack

I've written before about the growing enterprise open source stack, which pieces together disparate software to form a complete enterprise solution. Now here's a rather different kind of stack:

Canonical Ltd, the lead sponsor of the popular Ubuntu operating system, and Linspire, Inc. the developer of the commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name, today announced plans for a technology partnership that integrates core competencies from each company into the other's open source Linux offerings.

Linspire will transition from Debian to Ubuntu as the base for their Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems. (http://www.linspire.com/OSblocks). This will mean that Linspire users will benefit from Ubuntu's fast moving development cycles and focus on usability. The Freespire community will start seeing early releases of Freespire 2.0 based on Ubuntu in the first quarter of 2007, with the final release expected in the 2nd quarter of 2007, following the official release of Ubuntu 7.04 in April.

What this means in practice, as this neat diagram shows, is that Freespire, upon which Linspire is based, will now use Ubuntu as its own base. Since that, in its turn, is based on Debian (which Linspire used previously), we now have a neat stack of distributions, moving from Debian through Ubuntu and Freespire to Linspire, which progressively add more features - and take off more freedom as they add more proprietary code in one form or another. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)

Seeing Things from a Different Perspective

I first saw Kurosawa's Rashomon about 25 years ago. That whole world of black-and-white Japanese films produced in the 50s, 60s and 70s really made a huge impact on me at the time. They certainly changed the way I viewed cinema, and as a knock-on effect the way I viewed the world (well, bits of it, at least). So discovering that Rashomon is not only available as a download, but is free and in the public domain, got me thinking.

I presume this gift is a result of copyrights expiring - it was released in 1950 (that's one benefit of watching the classics). Which maybe means that plenty of other great films could be made available in this way (Mizoguchi, please, please, please). But imagine if even more recent films were available - think of the impact this would have people's understanding of the medium, and their view of it.

It's practically impossible to see these works nowadays, and pretty difficult even to buy them (Mizoguchi in particular seems badly served). Presumably this is because there's not much demand for such works. Which means, of course, that the copyright owners, whoever they are, would lose practically nothing if they released them now. Indeed, if they released them in a format suitable for downloading and viewing on PCs - that is, not super-high quality - they would probably start selling high-quality DVDs rather well.

Which rather puts copyright terms, to say nothing of extending them, in a different perspective. (Via Open the Future.)

Indonesia Hoards Bird 'Flu "Intellectual Property"

You had any doubts about whether intellectual monopolies were a good thing? Try this:

Indonesia is refusing to provide bird flu samples to other countries, companies and the World Health Organisation. Scientists and the WHO have expressed serious concerns about the ban, which they say hampers efforts to avoid a pandemic.

The move could set a precedent for international efforts to control the spread of viruses. Until now, countries have shared virus samples with the WHO, which then provides them to vaccine manufacturers.

In a highly unusual display of patriotism, the Health Minister, Siti Fadillah Supari, claimed Indonesia "owns" the bird flu strain which has spread across the nation, infecting tens of millions of chickens and killing at least 63 people.

Yesterday's announcement of a deal with the pharmaceutical company Baxter comes shortly after Indonesia condemned an Australian research breakthrough that could result in the production of a vaccine within months.

So as the cytokine storm kicks in, and you slowly drown in the fluid that was your lungs, hold on to this comforting thought: you and those you love may die, but the sacred IP virus will live on. (Via Technocrat.)

Pipe Dream: Re-wiring the Net

The online world is awash with XML feeds. The great thing about XML is that you can grab it and do stuff with it very easily, because it's basically a structured text file. For example, you can feed one XML stream into another, combine them, and keep on piping them around. A bit like Unix pipes.

Hey, now that's an idea:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

What's particularly cool about this new service is the graphical approach, which looks a lot like programming flowcharts. The currently-available pipes are rather limited at the moment - this is still very new - but it's not hard to imagine some very rich stuff coming out of this. Bravo Yahoo. (Via GigaOM.)

Of Continuous Improvement and Open Source

Hal Varian is one of the wisest - and oldest - commentators on Internet economics. he has a nice piece in the New York Times that looks at "continuous improvement":

What’s the difference between Vista and Google? There is no feasible way for Microsoft to experiment with Vista in real time; but it is very easy for Google to conduct controlled experiments and do so more or less continuously.

The same is obviously true for open source software: people can try out all kinds of variants before settling on the main code branch. And things don't need to be co-ordinated: hackers can just release the code and let it compete against other versions.

Yoga, Ayurveda and Open Source

Knopper's comments, noted below, were made during a talk at the Open Source conference, LinuxAsia 2007, in New Delhi, where Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Open Source Affairs at RedHat, drew comparisons between open source and India's rich cultural heritage:

"Yoga and Ayurveda, which are perhaps the largest knowledge pools, have traditionally been 'open source'," he said, "and yet it is a US$30 billion industry in the US alone. Open source is not opposed to commercial gains, it is opposed to ownership and limiting of knowledge and resources."

The Gospel According to St. Klaus

Klaus Knopper, the man behind the trailblazing Knoppix live distro, is brave enough to offer some thoughts on computing in the long term:

If proprietary software continues to dominate, within 10 years no one will be able to store any file and even view their own content without first paying a service provider to see it and the PC as we know it will be gone within 30 years.

The Biter Bit

This is why I just love it when Microsoft gets on its high horse about "piracy":

Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region’s Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring “license purity” in the region’s schools.

According to Nikolay Karpushin schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and Open office desktop apps, Ekho Moskvi reports. “Buying business and commercial programmes from producers is quite expensive”, the Minister said.

...

Nikolay Karpushin’s statement on the software license control in the region’s schools coincided with a scandalous court case against a Sepich school principal. The Prosecutor’s Office of the Vereshagino district has initiated a criminal case of copyright infringement against a school principal, Alexander Ponosov. The man is accused of illegal use of Microsoft products which resulted in a 260 thousand rubles ($9,8 thousand) damage for the company.

(Via The Inq.)

Sun Shines Again

Further to my general encomium on Sun, here's more good news:

Sun Microsystems... today announced the upcoming availability of the StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview plug-in application for Microsoft Office 2003. The early access version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in, available as a free download, will allow seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to ODF.

...

The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview is primarily based on the OpenOffice.org platform, the open-source office productivity suite developed by the OpenOffice.org community including the founder and main contributor Sun Microsystems. Sun offers distributions and configurations of and support for OpenOffice.org under the StarOffice brand. The initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only, but full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents is expected in April. The conversion is absolutely transparent to the user and the additional memory footprint is minimal.

This is particularly welcome since there are already noises that Microsoft's ODF plugin for Word is not as faithful in the translation process as might be desired.

And if that isn't enough, here's news that an OS/2 port of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is nearing completion. What more do you want? (Both via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

Give The RIAA Enough Network Cabling...

...and it will hang itself.

One of the under-appreciated benefits of a medium like Web publishing that has practically no barriers to entry is that anybody can post anything - and does. These might be veritable gems - or utter, own-foot-shooting howlers that in some respect are even more precious than said jewels.

For example:

Between 1983 and 1996, the average price of a CD fell by more than 40%. Over this same period of time, consumer prices (measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) rose nearly 60%. If CD prices had risen at the same rate as consumer prices over this period, the average retail price of a CD in 1996 would have been $33.86 instead of $12.75.

Only the RIAA.

Windows: Rat's Nest and Dog's Breakfast

As Edward Tufte has explained far more eloquently than I can, images are able to convey information far more compactly and efficiently than words. So you don't have to be a geek to appreciate the two images in this posting:

Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture.

Well, not quite. The upper picture shows Apache running on GNU/Linux; the lower, IIS running on Windows. The former looks like a motherboard: complicated but orderly; the latter is simply a rat's nest.

As the post says:

A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.

Now, some have criticised this on the grounds that people don't attempt to attack systems through static Web pages. This is true, but the point is, if this is the difference for a simple operation like displaying a Web page, imagine the contrast for more complex tasks. It is precisely those tasks that offer the greatest scope for finding weaknesses. Thus the images in the post above offer a graphic, if not literal, representation of the dog's breakfast that is Windows security. (Via Slashdot.)

Word of the Day: Ganking

Raph Koster has an interesting meditation on another interesting meditation on, er, ganking:

Ganking is defined as “someone powerful attacking someone weak.”

including this wonderful peroration:

true gankers were rewarded by fading into nobodiness, unable to attack or eventually even interact. Blank-faced, and eventually incapable of interacting at all. Insignificant, unranked, not even recognizable. The thought was, if you ever actually did render ganking as meaningless as its victims call it, the gankers would fade away, snarks and boojums all.

LiMo Foundation : What's in a Name?

Impressive line-up here:

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone established the LiMo Foundation to develop the Foundation Platform, a Linux-based, open mobile communication device software platform.

A world-class Linux-based platform aims to provide key benefits for the mobile industry including lower development costs, increased flexibility, and a richer mobile ecosystem - all of which contribute to the group's ultimate objective of creating compelling, differentiated and enhanced consumer experiences.

LiMo? Limo? Limo?? Now why does this not suggest low-cost mobile communication devices to me?

Perhaps this is why they choose the name:

This weekend in the Sunday Times job section they advertised for the new CEO and were offering £200k.

Plus limo, presumably.

Steve Jobs Gets Sane on DRM

A worryingly sensible viewpoint espoused here by Steve Jobs:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

In a heartbeat? The cynic in me is suspicious: if DRM were dropped, then Apple would be subject to much more direct competition. So why would Apple ever do this? Is Steve Jobs angling for a Nobel Prize for Peace, or something? (Via Wired News.)

Update: Larry Lessig makes a good point here.

ODF Moves Up a Gear

Yesterday I posted a story about ODF on the Linux Journal blog. The basic gist is that things are really starting to come together for ODF and OpenOffice.org, and that for a variety of reasons, 2007 could see the long-awaited breakthrough into the mainstream for both.

As if to prove my point, I learn today that not one, but two US states are considering mandating ODF: Texas and Minnesota. Europe has been moving increasingly in this direction, so it's good to see the US doing the same now.

This is classic positive-feedback stuff: the more people that get behind it, the more people will see it as a safe option and do the same. (With thanks to Ari Fishkind.)

Bestriding the Narrow World

Welcome back, Colossus.

Lifelogging

I've touched on the subject of lifelogging - recording every moment of your waking day - before, but this feature is by far the best exploration of the subject I've come across.

What's fascinating is that it draws together so many apparently disparate threads: openness, privacy, security, search technologies, storage, memories, blogging, online videos, virtual worlds, etc. etc. (Via 3pointD.com.)

Virtual World, Real Lawyers

Lawyers thrive on complication and ambiguity. Things don't get more complicated or ambiguous than in cyberspace - it's no coincidence that Larry Lessig rose to prominence as one of the first to wield the machete of his fine legal mind on this thicket.

Things are even more complicated in virtual worlds, because they are inherently richer. Here's a nice round-up of some of the legal issues involved. Two paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

One complicating factor is jurisdiction. Linden currently operates under California and U.S. law. British IP attorney Cooper says that virtual worlds like Second Life need a form of international arbitration. "If I get ... an Australian operating a business in Second Life, asking me, a U.K. attorney, how he can best protect his business within Second Life, how do I answer him?" he says, citing one query that he has received. But Cooper sees a model in the uniform dispute resolution policy (UDRP) for Internet domain names. Created in 1999 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UDRP created an international solution to issues like cybersquatting of domain names that were difficult or impossible to resolve in regional courts.

Cooper, Lieberman and other interested avatars, including the Second Life Bar Association and many non-lawyers, are now working together to formalize online arbitration as a required first step to handle Second Life disputes, without resort to real courts and their costs. Together they are lobbying Linden to include arbitration in its terms of service agreement. Meanwhile, Lieberman's group is introducing its proposed arbitration into the virtual world, hoping that other users will try it out and find it fair and useful.

(Via Second Life Herald.)

Second Life Comes to...Brighton?

Brighton is famous for many things, but cutting edge virtual world software development is not one of them. Until now:

Title: Software Developer
Department: Engineering
Work Location: San Francisco, Mountain View, Davis, Seattle or Brighton, UK

Open Hardware Licence

Another Bruce Perens production:

Many hardware designers wish to engage in collaborative development, just as Open Source programmers do today. The proliferation of programmable gate array devices and cheap circuit board prototyping are making this easier. One organization of hardware designers, TAPR, has produced and successfully manufactured innovative digital communications hardware designs since the 1980's, when they pioneered the first practical peer-to-peer wireless networking device.

This license will be deployed on a new wave of Open Source hardware. It is designed to be similar enough to Open Source Software licenses to be certifable under the Open Source Definition / Debian Free Software Guidelines, the generally-accepted definition of Open Source licensing, which I created in 1998.

Some Things Do Scale, It Seems

Great quote here:

The most concerning issue is the growth of bandwidth as piracy has shifted from stealing an individual song on Napster to stealing albums on Kaaza to now using Bittorent to steal entire Discographies.

Maybe there's a bit of a lesson to be learned from this. If music companies had sorted this out a few years back, and gone straight to DRM-less downloads, they wouldn't be facing this massively greater problem today. Moreover, once entire discographies are being passed around, the game's over, because the record companies have nothing left to offer as an incentive to choose them over underground sources.

The DRM Infection Masquerading as an OS

Charlie Demerjian on Vista's high points:

4) Mahjong Titans: If you don't have anything real to talk about, why not tout fluff. (Read this next part as me feigning excitement) Holy sh*t, Mah-fscking-jong!!! Way cool. I was only expecting a database filesystem and middleware layer four years ago, but Mahjong just blows me away. Now I understand where all those years, programmer-decades and billions of dollars went, certainly not flushed if you get Mahjong Titans! Damn grrl. Can you imagine if you could get this kind of awesomeness on the web for free, or at any of 17 billion freeware sites? Never happen, would it?

Warm Fuzzies in OpenOffice.org Calc

Once a mathematician, always a mathematician. I've been one since the age of 8, so when I came across FuzzyMath, a fuzzy logic add-in for OpenOffice.org Calc, I was naturally intrigued:

InrecoLAN FuzzyMath allows to use uncertain or approximate values in OpenOffice.org Calc. It means with InrecoLAN FuzzyMath you can perform ordinary arithmetic operations and use ordinary mathematical and financial functions with uncertain values as if they are standard, or crisp, numbers.

What's interesting about this - aside from the fact that it is maths - is that it shows that OpenOffice.org is gradually becoming a platform for all sorts of novel add-ins.
(Via Rob Weir.)

Mmmm: Meta-Guilds

I'm such a sucker for a good bit of meta:

A meta-guild -- i.e., a guild with a presence across a number of virtual worlds and/or MMOs -- allows a group to share their experiences of gameplay in various environments, and eases the process of traveling among such worlds for the individual.

Could This Be the Key to the Open Desktop?

A la rentrée 2007, le conseil régional d'Ile-de-France distribuera près de 200 000 clés USB équipées de logiciels libres.

[For the return to school in 2007, the regional council of the Ile-de-France will distribute 200,000 USB drives containing free software]

More specifically, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and VLC, all wrapped up in Framakey:

Experience Freedom wherever you go

The FramaKey is a package of ready to use Free Software, mounted on a USB key, that makes the life of the nomad user a lot easier.

Its goal is to provide you with the best of windows Free Software, already installed and set to run directly from your FramaKey. In doing so, there is no need for an installation, you can not only experience the software safely, but you do so without leaving any personal information on the host computer.
Running FramaKey:

The main advantage is that you can experience the freedom of not only moving anywhere with your documents and files, but also with your own, known and customized software environment.
A “Home Sweet Home” feeling anywhere, without leaving your prints and data on the computer hosting your FramaKey.
Examples:

The FramaKey will let you:

* Take your web browser with you, already set to your needs (skins, extensions, favourites, etc.), for safer browsing when on the move (FireFox).
* Manage your email accounts from the host computer without any need to modify its settings (Thunderbird).
* Work on your text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows from the best fully-integrated office application suite of the Free Software world (OpenOffice.org).
* Play just about any format of multimedia file, either audio or video, from the host computer without any player installation process (VideoLAN).
* Listen to your favourite tunes, either from .mp3 or .ogg files, from an easy, efficient and fast player (CoolPlayer).
* Save time by quickly and efficiently editing your files, no matter what the size, using a powerful editor with enhanced capabilities (SciTe).

Why can't more places do this?