Happy Birthday Browser

Or so it seems:

1991: Tim Berners-Lee, the acknowledged inventor of the World Wide Web, introduces WorldWideWeb, the first practical web browser.

A Crack in the Windows Tax?

One of the worst abuses of Microsoft's desktop power is that it is often very hard to buy a PC without being forced to pay for Windows, whether you want it or not. At long last, there are some cracks appearing in this monolithic approach, thanks, it seems, to Dell's Ideastorm:

It’s exciting to see the IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. Your feedback has been all about flexibility and we have seen a consistent request to provide platforms that allow people to install their operating system of choice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.

As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates.

It's a pity this weclome move is vitiated by a pathetic attempt at justifying the latter-day Windows tax:

We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.

So instead of "alienating" some GNU/Linux users, Dell decided it was better to alienate all of them. Right, that makes business sense. Now, tell me again why Dell is losing market-share?

Calling Ballmer's Bluff

This was something I was going to write about, but someone has gone one better and come up with an entire site devoted to the idea:

Open Letter to Steven Ballmer

It's come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property. Not only that, but it's been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can't provide.

Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code.

Show us the code, indeed.

Someting is Open in the State of Denmark

Good news from Denmark:

On Friday, the Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Helge Sander, made a press announcement (Danish) about his plan for following up on the Parliament Resolution 8 months ago.

The implementation plan is presented in a report which suggests that “open standards should be implemented gradually by making it mandatory for the public sector to use a number of open standards when this becomes technically feasible”.

The report identifies an initial sets of open standards as candidates for mandatory use from 1 January 2008 “if an economic impact assessment shows that this will not involve additional costs to the public sector”.

Hope for WIPO?

OK, I admit it: I've been a teensy bit negative about WIPO in the past. In part, this was because I thought there was precious little hope it would ever change substantively. Looks like I was wrong:

The agreement on dozens of WIPO reforms was broader and more substantive than had been anticipated. Some of the measures signal important changes in this controversial UN body. WIPO members agreed to "consider the preservation of the public domain within WIPO's normative processes and deepen the analysis of the implication and benefits of a rich and accessible public domain." WIPO agreed to "promote measures that will help countries deal with IP related anticompetitive practices." "Norm-setting activities shall . . . take into account different levels of development" and "take into consideration a balance between costs and benefits." WIPO adopted an expanded mandate to undertake studies to assess the economic, social and cultural impact of intellectual property practices and norm setting activities. All of this signals a new tone and approach for WIPO. In a sense, WIPO is finally entering the new century, and responding to the growing demand for reforms, and a more balanced approach to intellectual property protection.

DRM Causes Piracy

So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

Yup. (Via Slashdot.)

The Biter Bit - by Bits

Now that the flow of highly-personal "security" information between the US and other countries is a two-way thing, I predict people in the former are going to become as unenthusiastic about it as those in the latter:

Welcome to the new world of border security. Unsuspecting Americans are turning up at the Canadian border expecting clear sailing, only to find that their past -- sometimes their distant past -- is suddenly an issue.

While Canada officially has barred travelers convicted of criminal offenses for years, attorneys say post-9/11 information-gathering, combined with a sweeping agreement between Canada and the United States to share data, has resulted in a spike in phone calls from concerned travelers.

...

Oh, and by the way, if you don't need to travel to Canada, don't think you won't need to clear your record. Lesperance says it is just a matter of time before agreements are signed with governments in destinations like Japan, Indonesia and Europe.

"This," Lesperance says, "is just the edge of the wedge."

Oh, yes, indeedy.... (Via Slashdot.)

Renew for Freedom: Use It or Lose It

Brits, awake!

Why you should renew your passport, or apply for one IMMEDIATELY if you are aged 16 or over.

The Identity Cards Act 2006 turns your passport into a one-way ticket to control of your identity by the government. It means lifelong surveillance, and untold bureaucracy. This website, produced by the NO2ID campaign, is about how you can renew or apply for a passport to avoid being forced to register on the ID scheme database.

Everyone adult in the UK should do this now; I did as soon as Mad-eyed Tony pushed through his crazy ID Cards legislation, and they started building ID interrogation centres around the UK:

On March 26th 2007 the first of a new network of 69 government ID interrogation centres will open for business. If you apply for your first adult passport after this date, then you may be called for a compulsory "interview" at one of them.

So basically, you have to pay for the privilege of being interrogated; er, anybody seen the film Brazil?

Commons Sense from the EU Parliament

There's a lot wrong with EU Parliament (the small matter of expenses, for a start), but it does seem to have its heart in the right place (next to its wallet, perhaps...).

For example, the spectrum dividend produced by switching terrestial television from analogue to digital means that there's a whole load of yummy electromagnetic spectrum coming up for grabs. Some people (broadcasters etc.) just want to the whole lot auctioned off, but since this spectrum is a commons, and so belongs to you and me, wouldn't it be nice if we got to use through unlicensed frequencies?

And lo and behold, that's just what the EU Parliament is recommending:

The European Parliament,

– having regard to the Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions entitled 'A market-based approach to spectrum management in the European Union',

etc.

etc.

etc.

(Via openspectrum.info.)

Alfresco Sees the (GPL) Light

So, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company Alfresco has moved from the Mozilla Public Licence to the GNU General Public Licence (with the horribly-named "FLOSS exception"). This is good for Alfresco, and good for the GPL commons. It's also a nice confirmation of some of the things I was saying in this recent article about licensing, with the witty title "Lizenz zum Geldverdienen". Oh, yes, it's, er, in German (but an English version should follow in in due course).

Fake Steve Jobs: Suck 2.0?

I was heartened to see that the future of the Fake Steve Jobs blog now seems assured, following a deal with Wired (kudos). God knows we need more such snarky sites in an increasingly humourless and pusillanimous world.

Taking advantage of this new stability, I settled down to read a few of the many postings that I'd missed, and a distant cyber-bell began ringing. I thought: "I have been here before... I know the grass beyond the door", and then it struck me.

Once upon a time, in an online world far away, there was a little Web site called Suck. Its motto:

"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"

It came out of nowhere, starting on 28 August 1995, and ran for nearly six years. It was wonderful: it deflated the growing hype bubble that was Dotcom 1.0, and it did it with cool, mordant wit. (If you want the whole, roller-coaster story of Suck, read it here in Wired - rather appopriately, as it turns out.)

FSJ is Suck 2.0: it punctures that which must be punctured, and it does it with a different kind of wit, this time black and scabrous. But along with the similarities, there is an important difference between the two sites.

Suck, for all its undoubted virtues, took itself far too seriously, as any adolescent genius might. FSJ, by contrast, is more mature, more cynical; it takes nothing seriously, least of all itself (it is a parody site, after all). In other words, FSJ is the perfect mirror for the Web 2.0 world we live in.

Namaste, Steve.

Going Beyond: Ultra VioLet Composer

One of the common criticisms of the open source development methodology is that it only works for a limited class of software, namely those with big constituencies. According to this view, there are unlikely to be successful open source projects for niche sectors.

That may have been true in the early days of free software, but now that the number of developers who are prepared to get involved has grown, the overall scaling means that more such niches can be addressed.

A good example is VioLet Composer:

A modular multispace desktop music composer for Win32 (source available for porting). Features realtime wavelet processing, flexible arrangement, extensible sample types, autosaving and much, much more. Now with support for simple Buzz effects.

Great fun.

The Open Rainbow Nation

Big news from South Africa:

The South African Cabinet today announced that it had approved a free and open source strategy and that government would migrate its current software to free and open source software.

At a Cabinet media briefing government said that it had "approved a policy and strategy for the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) in government.

In a statement the cabinet said "all new software developed for or by the government will be based on open standards and government will itself migrate current software to FOSS. This strategy will, among other things, lower administration costs and enhance local IT skills."

"All the major IT vendors in the country have both supported the initiative and made contributions to the development of FOSS. Government departments will incorporate FOSS in their planning henceforth."

Given South Africa's position as the main economic motor of the region, this could have interesting knock-on effects elsewhere in the continent.
(Via Technocrat.)

Watch Out, There's a Weasel Word About

This blog has constantly warned readers to be on their guard against weasel words whose unexceptionable and generalised nature betray an intent to redefine. A classic example - double-barrelled to boot - is the Progress & Freedom Foundation, which has absolutely nothing to do with freedom as Richard Stallman would understand it, and as a concomitant, precious little to do with progress either.

As its About page makes clear, freedom means the right to impose intellectual monopolies - or, as it quaintly puts it:

the "imperative" to protect rich digital content and encourage innovation through the traditional legal notions of copyright and patent.

Hm, that's a new one: the imperative to impose intellectual monopolies. Not much freedom there, methinks. The other key phrases to note are "market-oriented policy" and "Applying benefit-cost analysis to proposals for regulation of the market for personal information" - so you can forget about any right to privacy: if it's profitable, it's good.

No surprise, then, that one of the foundation's luminaries has written an oh-so-reasonable defence of the Microsoft-Novell stitch-up. Except that it is fundamentally flawed, despite its reasonable tone.

Its central argument in favour of the oh-so-reasonable Microsoft-Novell stitch-up is as follows:

Customers also want freedom from concern about potential intellectual property problems. They do not want to worry whether someone might come out of left field claiming the right to enjoin some mission-critical application.

- and yes, there's that tell-tale little word "freedom" again.

So, as a customer, I'm supposed to worry about whether my supplier is infringing on somebody else's intellectual monopoly? Sorry, but I don't care a fig about the intellectual monopolies involved in products that I buy or use: I care about whether they do the job at a reasonable price. I expect the supplier to worry about the legal details - that's partly what I pay for.

Reframing it in these terms attempts to enmesh the user in the battles that try to employ intellectual monopolies as competitive weapons that are the very antithesis of progressive. It is a trick that aims to legitimise and bolster the strength of this approach, by falsely claiming that it matters to the general public. It is true that manufacturers and suppliers do indeed need to worry, unfortunately, but that is a problem, and a reflection of how the original legal frameworks have been distorted by corporate lawyers and greedy industries.

To remedy this situation, we all need to ignore those issues, and fight for minimalist intellectual monopolies - 14 years for copyright, as it was originally, and patents whose scope is narrowed considerably, or, ideally, abolished entirely.

Needless to say, since the premise of the article is mistaken, its conclusion is too: the Microsoft-Novell deal is bad for customers, since it brings in patenting issues where there aren't any. After all, if Microsoft really believed open source infringed on its patents it would go to court, as it routinely has in the past. Are we supposed to believe that Steve Ballmer has come over all magnanimous, and wants to give open source a chance to reform? I think not.

It's also a disaster for Novell, which is now tainted by Redmond's kiss of Judas. Indeed, I strongly suspect that in retrospect it will be seen as the inflection point that began the company's terminal decline.

Vote for ODF

Undeterred by the fact that Our Tone simply ignored our last petition to dump ID cards, I've signed up for another one, this time calling for ODF to be used in UK government. If you're a citizen of Perfidious Albion, you might like to do the same.

Not that it will make a huge difference, but I think we have a responsibility to (a) use these new tools for democracy and (b) force the UK Government to repeat its pathetic excuses for not supporting eminently reasonable ideas. There's also increasing evidence that the e-petition site is turning into a thorn in the goverment's side - reason enough to keep using it.

You Wait Ages for a Bus...

...and then three come along at once.

Once upon a time, people looked down on ODF because it seemed the Cinderella of formats: rather poor, and with nowhere to go. Today, it's looking much richer, and with three format conversion tools - one from Microsoft, one from Sun and a new online service from Lettos - it's no longer looking so isolated. And the nice thing is, it's going to get even better. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Planting the Bulb of a Good Idea

News that Australia plans to ban incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy efficient fluorescent bulbs led to me this site: Ban the Bulb, whose campaign goals are to

Increase the cost of incandescent light bulbs
Reduce the sales tax (VAT) on CFLs [compact fluorescent lights] from 17.5% to 5%
Ban the sale of incandescents by a specific date
Help the poor to replace their incandescents
Help the poor to save money on their bills
Encourage the responsible recycling of CFLs
Include light bulbs in the EU's Eco Directive
Explain the benefits of greater energy efficiency
Accelerate the uptake of available technologies

Banning incandescent light bulbs it would...Save the UK 3.6 Million tonnes of CO2 per year

This is an idea that has occurred to me (and to millions of others, I suspect), so it's good to see someone doing something about it.

As Matt Prescott, the founder of the campaign, explains:

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

Ending the life of this inefficient and obsolete technology is not enough to prevent damaging climate change; but it is an easy first step, and one the world should not hesitate to take.

This needs to be done now. We can all contribute - I've now replaced about 95% of the bulbs I use, with the others scheduled to disappear soon - but governments must get involved too.

The Death of TV?

Well, not quite, alas, but certainly an interesting shift:

We think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense.

What seems to be happening here is that blogs are eating newspapers' lunch, so the newspapers are eating TV's lunch. Sounds fair to me. (Via PaidContent.)

The Incorruptible Blogosphere

John Dvorak is the original angry old man of computer journalism. I've been reading his stuff for decades now. It's striking that he's increasingly off-beam compared to the "good old days" of his column in PC Magazine, when he more than anyone had his finger on the pulse of personal computing. But he's still a good and entertaining journalist (after all, when has being right ever been that important in this business?).

Here's a good example of Dvorak at his best, writing about the essential incorruptibility of the blogosphere - not, be it noted, of bloggers, but of the totality of them:

While many bloggers seem eagerly corruptible — almost inviting it — it's not going to make any difference because there will be 10 to 100 bloggers pointing the finger at them and another 1,000 analyzing the finger-pointing.

Spot on; this another reason why open, non-hierarchical systems work so much better than closed, centralised ones in these kinds of situations. (Via Smart Mobs.)

Thanks, Tony - But No Thanks

I received an email from Tony Blair yesterday. Not that this was so special, since he also sent it to the other 28,000 people who had signed an e-petition calling for ID cards to be scrapped. You can read the missive here (and if you're feeling really left out, you can copy it into an email to yourself and pretend that it came from our Tone).

What's particularly galling is that this email essentially says "thanks for your request, but get lost", and then goes on to repeat all the tired old misinformation about the ID card scheme's cost, its efficacy against terrorism and how it will reduce identity theft. Although I could pick some of its arguments apart, I'd rather leave it to the master himself, The Reg's John Lettice:

The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list, giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants, says Tony Blair. Nor are fingerprints in other EU countries necessarily safe - the introduction of biometric technology, he adds, will "improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.

Blair made the pledge to collar the lot of us, and some, as part of a rag-bag of warmed-over, half-baked, misleading, and just plain untrue claims issued in an email to the near-28,000 signatories of the Downing Street petition calling for the scrapping of the ID card scheme.

Damn DRM

The FT has little votette underway:

Should music companies drop DRM?

Steve Jobs, Apple’s charismatic chief executive, has proposed that record companies drop their insistence that music sold over the web be protected by digital rights management technology. DRM is designed to combat piracy but limits the ways consumers can use music they have purchased.

You may want to join in (no registration required)....

Godless Commies Choose Godless Commie OS

Given the number of times free software has been mischaracterised as communist, this seems rather appropriate:

Cuba's communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire _ Microsoft Corp. _ by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source software.

Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who freely share their code.

"It's basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of ideology," said Hector Rodriguez, who oversees a Cuban university department of 1,000 students dedicated to developing open-source programs.

In Praise of the Open Singularity

There's a characteristically thoughtful post over on Open the Future called "Open Source Terraforming" (great title). But even better, perhaps, is a link to the original post that gave the blog its name. How's this for a peroration?

The greatest danger we face comes not from a singularity itself, but from those who wish us to be impotent at its arrival, those who wish to keep its power for themselves, and those who would hide its secrets from the public. Those who see the possibility of a revolutionary future of abundance and freedom are right, as are those who fear the possibility of catastrophe and extinction. But where they are both wrong is in believing that the future is out of our hands, and should be kept out of our hands. We need an open singularity, one that we can all be a part of. That kind of future is within our reach; we need to take hold of it now.

Dell 2.0

Like most readers of this blog, I spend so much time leading a Web 2.0 existence, that I am often surprised, as I emerge blinking into the sunlight, that the Real World is still resolutely 1.0. So the news that Dell is starting to get it with the launch of its (horribly-named) Dell IdeaStorm is a welcome sign that that parts of the world are upgrading:

The name is a take-off on the word “brainstorm” and it is our way of building an online community that brings all of us closer to the creative side of technology by allowing you to share ideas and interact with other customers and Dell experts. You can suggest new products or services you’d like to see Dell develop or tell the world how you feel about major trends in technology and society. We hope this site fosters a candid and robust conversation about your ideas.

Of course, candid conversations have to be two-way, Mikey, so it will be interesting to see whether you live up to your side of the bargain. In particular, the top three suggestions - no extra installed software, and pre-installed GNU/Linux distros - are all very easy to implement if the will is there.

It seems very open: I just went there and clicked on a few stories without any kind of registration required. This obviously leaves it open to abuse, but with luck the sheer volume of genuine users will swamp and attempt to game the system. (Via TechCrunch.)

Update 1: There are now nigh on 50,000 votes for the GNU/Linux option...let's hope Mikey is listening.

Update 2: May be things are moving:

While "I can't speak specifically to Linux," Pearson said, "I can assure you it is getting full attention."

Jim Gray

This doesn't look good. Very sad. He was a real pleasure to interview.