The Tim O'Reilly of Open Access

I thought I knew open access history pretty well, but to my shame I seem to overlooked Melissa Hagemann:

Hagemann's strategic, behind-the-scenes planning on behalf of the Open Access movement during the past five years set in motion the series of events that have affected scholarship around the globe. It began in the summer of 2001, following critical developments in the Open Archives Initiative; the Public Library of Science petition advocating free access to research; and the establishment of BioMed Central. An environmental scan led her to layer her own assessment of what libraries and researchers needed on top of the varied, independent initiatives for free access underway among players in scholarly communication. She and her OSI colleagues brainstormed on a way to unify the movement under one umbrella – the umbrella of as yet-unnamed Open Access – and OSI gave her the go-ahead to convene the initial BOAI meeting.

BOAI refers to the Budapest Open Access Initiative; it was at this meeting that the phrase "open access" was coined and defined. In other words, it stand in the same relationship to the open access movement as the Freeware Summit does to open source. Which pretty much makes Hagemann the Tim O'Reilly of open access, I suppose. (Via Open Access News.)

Welcome to Topsy-Turvy Land

So let me get this straight: Labour, party of the left, seems locked in a loving embrace with that arch-capitalist, Bill Gates, while the Conservatives, party of the right, is smitten with that commie open source stuff:

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government.

China Virtually Clueless

Oh dear:

Worried that virtual currencies from online games could undermine the country’s financial system, Beijing has taken steps to restrict their conversion into yuan and use to buy real goods, and banned the opening of new Internet cafés.

Beijing is struggling to rein in the hot money flushing around of the country, hoping to keep the yuan from appreciating too fast against the dollar.

The measures against virtual currencies, announced by China’s state news agency Xinhua in a joint communiqué by 14 government agencies, were said to be aimed at preventing them from wreaking havoc on the real-world economy.

Titled, “A notice about further steps in strengthening the management of Internet cafés and Internet gaming,” it says that the redemption of virtual currencies in value exceeding their original purchasing prices will be banned to prevent attempts to realize profits. It also says they cannot be used to buy real goods, only virtual products and services provided by the gaming operators who issue the currencies.

Which means, of course, that as well as being virtual, all this dosh will now go undergound, making it even harder to control.

Remembrance of Sims Past

There's a fascinating post over on 3pointD.com, which exhumes some screenshots of sims as they were three years ago, and contrasts them with their present form. It's impressive to see how far Second Life has come in that time - and exciting to consider how far it might go in the next three years.

But seeing these old sims made me wonder whether we are in danger of losing our virtual past, since these screenshots are the exception, rather than the rule. When the history of virtual worlds comes to be written, vital data about how things looked in those days - nowadays, too - will have gone for ever.

Clearly, what we need is a kind of Internet Archive for virtual worlds that preserves not just the screenshots, but maybe the actual data files for "historic" and representative sims - a Virtual World Archive. Brewster Kahle, are you listening?

On the Social Use of Visualisations

I'm a sucker for anything meta, so I find these meta-analyses of data irresistible. The article is mainly about IBM's Many Eyes, but also mentions Swivel, which I've written about before, and Data360, which I haven't. The more the merrier, say I.

Sun's Darkstar Joins the GPL Light Side

Sun continues its progress through the ranks of open source supporters, hurtling fast towards top-spot as Richard Stallman's Number 1 friend. The latest move is the open sourcing of its Project Darkstar:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced plans today at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to open source Project Darkstar, a ground-breaking online game server platform written entirely in Java technology, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The company also announced the opening of registration for the Darkstar Playground, which will enable developers to create a wide variety of games that can be provisioned through a single server platform.

...

"Project Darkstar is proving to be an important technology foundation in the exploding multiplayer online game marketplace," said Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer, Sun Microsystems. "By open sourcing Darkstar technology, we will help enable the widest possible market for online game developers and remove their burden of having to build enterprise-grade server solutions, leaving them to do what they do best—build great game experiences."

Game developers can download the latest version of Project Darkstar at www.projectdarkstar.com. This new release of Project Darkstar features a simpler programming interface for increased productivity; plug-in APIs to facilitate integration of third party extensions; and enhancements for scalability , robust performance, and fault-tolerant operation. The source code for Project Darkstar will become available under a GPL license in the coming months

Aside from underlining Sun's support for the GPL, this announcement is also interesting for the light that it shines on the increasingly mainstream nature of online games. The fact that Sun has such a project is surprising, but open-sourcing it makes a lot of sense in an increasingly competitive market. For one thing, it bolsters Java, which stands at a critical juncture in its development. If Sun can build up enough momentum behind it, Java could well enjoy something of a second coming.

Déjà Lu

See: it's not just me....

Although Microsoft’s attempt to exploit Google’s YouTube problems is understandable, it’s also slightly repulsive and reeks of desperation. The software titan is hoping to build itself up by tearing Google down, never a good long-term strategy for success. Microsoft might damage Google’s reputation in the short-term, but it’s highly doubtful that Google’s incredible usefulness, not to mention its solid legal footing, will slip over time.

In the meanwhile, Microsoft will still be Microsoft, still playing distant second to Google. I would argue that Microsoft has damaged its own reputation with this lambast, showing to the world how it’s willing to tear down rivals instead of building itself up. That’s just not classy.

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.

Real Openness, Real Guts

Carl Malamud is one of the original digital pioneers, probably best-known for founding Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Talk Radio. But as well as the technology, he also has the moral side covered too.

Try reading this astonshing letter to the head of C-SPAN, following discussions about fair use of its recordings. It concludes with the following bold offer:

C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.

I thus write to you today with a specific request and a notice:

1. Your inventory shows 6,251 videos of congressional hearings for sale in the C-SPAN store at an average price of $169.50, for a total retail value of approximately $1,059,544. I am offering today to purchase this collection of discs from you for the purpose of ripping and posting on the Internet in a nonproprietary format for reuse by anybody. I understand your store would take a while to process such an order and am willing to place it in stages.
2. I have purchased Disc 192720-1 from the C-SPAN store, ripped more than one minute of video from the disc, and used it for the creation of a news and satirical commentary of compelling public interest and then posted the resulting work at the Internet Archive. I did not ask C-SPAN for a license and I assert fair use of this material.

Mr. Lamb, C-SPAN has been a pioneer in promoting a more open government. You created a grand bargain with the Cable Industry and the U.S. Congress. When I created the first radio station on the Internet and was asked why I did so as a non-profit instead of going for the gold like many of my colleagues, my reply has always been that I was inspired by your example.

Your grand bargain has served the American people and the C-SPAN organization well. Holding congressional hearings hostage is not in keeping with your charter, and it is not in keeping with the spirit of that grand bargain you made with the American people. Please re-release this material back into the public domain where it came from so that it will continue to make our public civic life richer.

Sincerely yours,

Carl Malamud

(Via Jon Udell.)

Exadel's Open Source Cornucopia

Now here's a real confluence:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Exadel, the leader in providing rich application components for creating a new generation of enterprise solutions, today announced a strategic partnership that will add mature, Eclipse-based developer tools for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and rich, Web 2.0 applications to Red Hat's integrated platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This move marks the first time that a high caliber set of Eclipse-based developer tools will be available in open source.

Exadel will open source all of its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, as well as consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org, the community behind open source projects that roll up into JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In turn, Red Hat will work jointly with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam.

So, here we have a company open sourcing its products, through a collaboration with Red Hat. As well as confirming the latter's central position in the open source ecosystem, it also boost Eclipse and Java while it's at it.

That's a pretty powerful payload from one announcement, and testimony to the multiplicative effects of open source, which tends to empower everything within its range, unlike proprietary moves, which are generally subtractive, damaging other offerings.

EU in SL?

Apparently:

The European Union is looking into entering the virtual world and opening up an office in Second Life - an increasingly popular internet-based virtual world - which the Swedish government and the French presidential candidates have already entered.

Some would say the European Union's grasp of reality is already pretty tenuous.... (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Opening up the Patent Process

Here's a mildly hopeful development:

The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Whether it improves the quality of patents awarded remains to be seen, but at least they're trying. It also shows how the idea of openness is spreading into even the bastions of the knowledge establishment.

Just Plain Wrong

I've noticed an interesting new meme creeping into UK politics. When the Government is presented with a statement or facts that it doesn't like, it doesn't condescend to refute them; instead it simply states they are "just plain wrong". End of argument, end of story, go away little person.

Call is the anti-open meme.

Brussels Declaration Stinks

It's always a sign that you're winning when the opposition start getting seriously desperate in their tactics. Here's a fine example:

Many declarations have been made about the need for particular business models in the STM information community. STM publishers have largely remained silent on these matters as the majority are agnostic about business models: what works, works. However, despite very significant investment and a massive rise in access to scientific information, our community continues to be beset by propositions and manifestos on the practice of scholarly publishing. Unfortunately the measures proposed have largely not been investigated or tested in any evidence-based manner that would pass rigorous peer review. In the light of this, and based on over ten years experience in the economics of online publishing and our longstanding collaboration with researchers and librarians, we have decided to publish a declaration of principles which we believe to be self-evident.

This so-called Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing is supported by the usual suspects - hello, Elsevier - but it's disappointing to see major university presses like those from Cambridge and Oxford putting their names to this arrant, self-interested nonsense.

The emphasis is squarely on business models, and gives little space to larger issues like the public's right to see the research that they pay for, or of researchers' rights to maximise the credit they gain from their work. Instead it consists of risible claims such as:

Publishers launch, sustain, promote and develop journals for the benefit of the scholarly community

Yeah, right, I can just imagine all the fraught meetings where publishers with furrowed brows mull over ways they can help the scholarly community. Yeah, I bet every waking thought is devoted to the subject. That's why the prices of journals have been rising at multiples of inflation for many years; that's why libraries are being bullied into buying group subscriptions, including titles they're not interested in. Purely for the benefit of the scholarly community, you understand.

The Empire Strikes Back

One of the benefits of open courseware is that it allows developing countries to access high-quality teaching materials for no cost. But in a move heavy with symbolism, India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning is now offering course materials itself. Great to see openness becoming bidirectional. (Via Open Access News.)

FDA Denies Evolution

Its seems the US FDA, like the equivalent European authorities before it, has decided to ignore evolution:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.

Open Science Enters the Mainstream

Interesting not so much for what it says, but that it's Business Week that's saying it:

Just as the Enlightenment ushered in a new organizational model of knowledge creation, the same technological and demographic forces that are turning the Web into a massive collaborative work space are helping to transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. Yes, the Web was, in fact, invented as a way for scientists to share information. But advances in storage, bandwidth, software, and computing power are pushing collaboration to the next level. Call it Science 2.0.

Mani Pulite Go Virtual

This probably won't mean much if you haven't followed Italian political history for the last 15 years, but I was intrigued to learn that Antonio di Pietro, perhaps the most famous of the prosecutors during the great Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) campaign to rid Italy of the endemic political corruption by the mafia, has gone Second life - and even blogged about it:

I have purchased an island and planted the banner of Italia dei Valori. On the initiative of Italia dei Valori, the island will soon be fitted out with offices, conference centres and information points.

In the future, visitors to the island will be welcomed by Italia dei Valori personnel through their virtual representation. The island will also be used for internal meetings and for meeting with journalists.

Microsoft Patents "Lack Significant Innovation"

Now here's an interesting little cross-cultural spat:

The European Commission has warned Microsoft that it could impose further penalties in its ongoing antitrust case against the software giant.

The EC claimed on Thursday that Microsoft wants to charge too much for interoperability protocol licences that enable third-party software vendors to develop software compatible with Windows servers. In a damning statemement, the EC claimed that the protocols "lack significant innovation", even though Microsoft has been awarded patents on much of the technology in question.

And what's Microsoft's response? Why, to go running to Mummy:

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith responded that other government agencies had found "considerable innovation" in Microsoft's protocol technology.

"US and European patent offices have awarded Microsoft more than 36 patents for the technology in these protocols, which took millions of dollars to develop, and another 37 patents are pending, so it's hard to see how the Commission can argue that even patented innovation must be made available for free," said Smith in a statement.

Hey Brad, you don't think this might be because the patent system in many countries is horribly broken, and regularly awards patents for obvious, trivial and otherwise inappropriate ideas? Just a thought.

Manage Real Money in Second Life

Why does this worry me?

Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies.

Googling World of Warcraft

WoW - or rather World of Warcraft - real search for a virtual world:

The Armory is a vast searchable database of information for World of Warcraft - taken straight from the real servers, updated in real time, and presented in a user-friendly interface. Since the Armory pulls its data from the actual game servers, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on the characters, arena teams, and guilds of World of Warcraft in existence.

(Via Clickable Culture.)

BBC Gets Some Things - Like YouTube

Elsewhere, I've criticised the BBC for its all-too eager embrace of Windows DRM. But in some respects, some of its top people understand the new dynamics:

The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.

...

Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC's brand.

"We don't want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us," he said.

Whatever Happened to Borland?

Rather longer ago than I care to think, there was a software company called Borland, run by an ebullient Frenchman by the name of Philippe Kahn. Philippe, I presume, is out sailing his yacht, and Borland still seems to be there. Good to see that one of Borland's best products, Delphi, is also moving into new waters:

Delphi for PHP is the first completely integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for PHP. Delphi’s proven and familiar visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach means you are quickly up to speed and productive, without the headaches normally associated with learning a new development environment. The powerful PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source components.

(Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Waiting for the Green Biotech Hackers

An interesting meditation on green biotech hacking, and why we're not quite there yet:

The bigger problem, though, is the turnaround time. No engineer or hacker wants to wait four weeks to see if a program works. Hit compile, wait for four weeks, no "Hello World." Start trying to debug the bug, with no debugging tools. No thanks. (I've actually had discussions with geneticists/molecular biologists who think even waiting a few days for a synthesis job isn't a big deal. But what can you say -- biology just hasn't been a hacker culture. And we are the poorer for it.)

I arrived here from the fine Open the Future blog, which had this very insightful comment in the same context:

Green biotech hacking is still in the punch-card era, and ... computer hacker culture really didn't take off until you got past punch-cards into time-sharing, where the cost in time and money was low enough that mistakes were something to learn from, not dread.

I think the latter phrase - "mistakes are something to learn from, not dread" - could well stand as an armourial motto for the entire open movement.

Undermining Digg

Digg occupies such an emblematic place in the Web 2.0 world that it's important to understand what's really going on with this increasingly powerful site (on the rare occasions that I've had stories dugg, my traffic has been stratospheric for a day or two before sagging inexorably down to its usual footling levels.)

So this story from Annalee Newitz on Wired News is at once fascinating and frightening:

I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What's more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a "popular" story that earned 124 diggs -- more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.

Although it's worrying that Digg can be gamed so easily, there's hope too:

Ultimately, however, my story did get buried. If you search for it on Digg, you won't find it unless you check the box that says "also search for buried stories." This didn't happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however -- it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story's legitimacy. Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.

Digg remains a fascinating experiment in progress; let's hope it works out.