Going Qwaqqers About Qwaq

Even though Second Life gets the lion's share of the attention, there are several other virtual world systems out there, including some that are fully open source. One such is Croquet:

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

The ideas behind Croquet are undeniably powerful, but it's always looked a little clunky when I've investigated it, more like a research project than anything that you might use. In other words, a solution in search of a problem.

Well, the problem has just turned up, and involves creating a secure virtual workspace for distributed teams. In the corporate context, the Second Life gew-gaws are less important than functionality like security and the ability to collaborate on any application. A new company called Qwaq, which includes many of the key people from the Croquet project, has been set up to meet that need.

It adopts a hybrid approach for its licensing: the core code is Croquet, and hence open source, but Qwaq adds proprietary elements on top. Obviously, I'd prefer it if everything were free code from the start, but it's understandable if new companies are cautious when dabbling with this tricky open source stuff. The existence of Qwaq, which obviously has a vested interest in the survival and development of Croquet, is already good news for the latter, but I predict that in time the company will gradually open up more of its code in order to tap into the community that will grow around it.

Its business model could certainly cope with that: it offers two versions of its product - one as a hosted service, the other run on an intranet. Although it is true that other companies could also host and support the product in this case, Qwaq has a unique strength that comes from the people working for it (rather like the advantage that Red Hat's roster of kernel hackers confers.)

One of the benefits of using Croquet as the basis of its products is that the protocols are open, and this allows Croquet-compatible products to interoperate with Qwaq's. This means that the dynamics of the Croquet ecosystem are similar to that of the Web, which is never a bad thing.

At the time of writing, there's not much to see on Qwaq's site, but I imagine that will change soon, and I'll update this post to reflect that (and also be writing elsewhere about the technology and its applications). In the meantime, Qwaq's arrival is certainly welcome, since it signals a new phase in the roll-out and commercialisation of standards-based virtual spaces. I'm sure we'll see many more in the future.

Update: The Qwaq site has now gone live, with some info and a screenshot of the Qwaq Forums product, as well as a link to a datasheet. There is also a short press release available.

Opening Up the Euro-Augean Farms

Openness and governments go together like horses and horseless carriages, so I was heartened to come across what sounds like a major victory for open access to key information in the shape of FarmSubsidy.org:

Farmsubsidy.org uses freedom of information laws to force European governments to release detailed data on who gets what from Europe's €48.5 billion annual farm subsidy payments. We then make this data available online.

There's a good history of how this happened, which also provides something of a blueprint for further openness. (Via WorldChanging.)

Chilling Freedom of Speech on Polar Bears

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

Like them, I am speechless.

All A-twitter about Twitter

Like many, I've been following Twitter with interest, if a certain bemusement: just what is the attraction of knowing that your mates are drinking a cup of coffee or taking the dog for a walk?

This post provides perhaps the best explanations so far as to why Twitter is important:

You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

But will I use it? Not yet, although at some point I may dip a cyber-toe, as I have with LinkedIn: not because I need it, but because these social networks are indisputably an interesting trend.

Has Microsoft Blinked on Office formats?

Microsoft Corp's director of corporate standards has conceded that 'legitimate concerns' have been raised in response to its attempt to fast-track the approval of its Open XML format by ISO.

The level of criticism targeted at Microsoft's XML-based office productivity file formats is significant, raising the potential that Open XML might not gain ISO approval, but Microsoft's Jason Matusow insisted there is still a long way to go.

This is interesting: it's the first time that I've come across Microsoft expressing any kind of doubts about OOXML, its rival to ODF, romping home to become an ISO standard. I can only assume that there was a presumption on the company's part that for all the free software world's whingeing, the national bodies who have the right to object, wouldn't.

But they did. As Andy Updegrove explains:

14 of 20 responses were clearly negative, two indicated divisions of opinion, three were inconclusive or neutral, and one offered no objections.

This is very different from Microsoft's own summary:

"Of the 19 submissions, some are very supportive of XML and the process, some are neutral, and some had legitimate concerns that were raised."

Clearly, this is stretching the truth to breaking point. I get the impression the company's really getting worried over this one, as it begins to spin totally out of its control.

Open Geology

Once that open access, open data meme starts spreading, there's just no stopping it....

British scientists are leading an international effort to bring together all the known geological information about every country in the world. By making the data freely available and allowing researchers to track geological features across national boundaries, the project will make it easier to plan international projects, predict earthquakes and locate natural resources such as oil and gas.

Once the project, called OneGeology, is up and running the data will be searchable via the internet. "Geology has no respect for national frontiers," said Ian Jackson, who is coordinating the project for the British Geological Survey (BGS). "The data exists, but accessibility is the key."

Digital Memories of the Tibetan Uprising

I've written before about how digital technology can be applied by the oppressed and disenfranchised to help preserve their identity. It's good therefore to see new-ish technologies like YouTube being pressed into similar service for a mass online protest focussing on March 10:

On March 10, 1959, Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to actively resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tens of thousands of Tibetans risked their lives to protect their nation and their beloved leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They gave of themselves so that future generations could live to continue the fight and regain the freedom of Tibet.

This March 10, we will honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Metaweb, not Betterweb?

Is it just me, or does this sound like a horribly retrograde move?

A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines.

...

The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog.

A single database for all the world's digital information? Since when did massive, centralised, single point-of-failure systems come back into vogue? Google's holdings are bad enough.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Update: To be fair, it seems to be adopting a sensible licensing policy, so maybe there's hope yet:

We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive corporate licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.

In addition, Tim O'Reilly has a more upbeat (perhaps because better-informed) assessment here. I can see a little better what they're trying to do, but I'm still not convinced by the centralised nature of it. Opinions?

Open Source Business Models

As readers of this blog may recall, in general I'm not a big fan of analysts, since they seem to offer very little other than a re-statement of what was blindingly obvious six months ago. But there are honourable exceptions.

Take, for example, this insightful presentation by Brent Williams, a self-styled "(temporarily) Independent Equity Research Analyst". It's unusual because it manages to combine a good understanding of the open source model and world with some grown-up economics. The result is well-worth reading.

I don't think Williams will be independent for long. (Via Once more unto the breach.)

Urban Forest Tracker = Open Source 2.0?

Traditionally, open source has been most successful when applied to generic, mainstream software categories - operating systems, Web servers, browser etc. Specialised, vertical applications have not generally been thought suitable, because the pool of interested people who can contribute bug reports and fixes is small.

But the appearance of this open source urban forest tracking system suggests we may be entering a new phase:

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.

This new project will probably work not so much because there is a huge untapped group of urban forest tracking system hackers just waiting to hit some code, but because there are plenty of tree-huggers who will help debug the system and input data. In other words, these new kinds of open source projects - call them open source 2.0 - only require a small core of coders to maintain, but survive and thrive thanks to the larger group of suppliers of open data.

AllPeers Goes OP2Pen

I can't help feeling that P2P is so, well, you know, dotcom 1.0. And I must confess that I've never had the slightest urge to use the AllPeers Firefox extension, even though it sounds cool enough:

when we set out to create our Drag-n-Share Firefox extension, we didn’t just take the most direct route to deploying the functionality we felt our users would want. We also built a powerful platform with features that could be used by many types of next-generation web applications: a generic resource framework, a scalable data store and of course a full-fledged peer-to-peer network. By baking the tricky bits into the browser platform, we hope that AllPeers will simplify the deployment of applications that work with structured data (like microformats), store this data where it makes the most sense (whether on the user’s machine or on a centralized server) and make real-time communication between users a snap.

But news that it has seen the light and is going open source is nonetheless highly welcome. It will be interesting to see how it develops as a result.

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.