From his office in Nevada, entrepreneur Dennis Hope has spawned a multi-million-dollar property business selling plots of lunar real estate at $20 (£10) an acre.
Uh-huh.These are "truly unowned lands", he says. "We're doing exactly what our forefathers did when they came to the New World from the European continent."
"Truly unowned" as in "truly, a commons owned collectively by the native American tribes that were living there for thousands of years"?
Sheesh, when will they learn?
Last week I noted a highly partial piece of writing that leapt to Microsoft's defence over its dispute with European Commission. And what do we have here? Why, a highly partial piece of writing that leaps to Microsoft's defence over its dispute with European Commission:the Commission alleges that Microsoft has established "unreasonable" prices for its protocol licensing of its server technology in Europe. The Commission characterizes Microsoft's proprietary server software protocols, which is protected by patent, copyright and trade secret law, as containing "virtually no innovation." The Commission then remarkably concludes that everyone in the industry, nonetheless, "needs" Microsoft's protocols, and that Microsoft should provide them "royalty-free." What the EC demands in the end is that Microsoft make its intellectual property available to its competitors for free.
Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, yes:The heart of the commission's theory, to quote its press release, is that "there is no significant innovation in the interoperability information" supplied by Microsoft and "hence the prices proposed by Microsoft are unreasonable." On this basis, the assertion is that Microsoft may charge only a nominal fee for the 10,000 pages of technical documentation it has provided and may face fines of up to 2 million to 3 million euros a day if the company does not yield.
The commission is silent on some inconvenient truths. European and U.S. patent offices have awarded Microsoft 36 patents for the technology in these interoperability protocols, and the company has an additional 37 pending applications being reviewed by patent offices around the world.
In order for technology to be patentable, it must be novel, "non-obvious," and make a technical contribution—in short, it must be innovative. What's more, trade secrets and knowhow also are valuable intellectual property, valued independently of their patentable character and protected by law and precedent internationally and in the EU. Indeed, the World Trade Organization's TRIPS agreement, to which all EU 27 member states are bound, expressly protects undisclosed information as a form of intellectual property, different from but co-equal with patents.
Uncanny: it's almost as if they were part of a concerted campaign, or something.
The multi-platform IM program Gaim is one of the must-have open source tools. Even though its technology has been great, it's had big problems with its name:Many years ago when this project was first started, it was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger." AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the name to "Gaim." AOL was appeased, and no one really ever heard of it because there were very few users back then.
A few years later AOL trademarked "AIM," and started referring to their IM services using that name. They complained. The issue was brought up on Slashdot, and the Gaim developers at the time got some legal support. That legal support advised that the ongoing discussions with AOL be kept confidential until fully settled, and so it remained. The public thought the issue had gone away then. It sorta did, in that AOL stopped responding to Gaim's legal support for a while.
Our legal support has changed several times, and each group of lawyers have recommended silence & secrecy. Around the time of Gaim's first 2.0.0 beta, AOL came back into our lives in a very strong way, this time threatening to sue Sean.
The result is a definitive change of name from Gaim to Pidgin - rather apt, as this Wikipedia article explains.
It's catching on:Walkers are to be given the "right to roam" around the entire coastline of Britain, under government proposals.
...
Mr Miliband told the Independent on Sunday: "England's coastline is a national treasure. It should be the birthright of every citizen.
A Slashdot post reveals the precise geographical location of my ignorance about GeoRSS:Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds
This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.
To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.
This is apparently a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium, although, alas, its openness is limited in extent:Q: Does OGC promote free software and free data?
A: No. OGC promotes the development and use of consensus-derived publicly available and open specifications that enable different geospatial systems (commercial or public domain or open source) to interoperate. For example, OpenGIS Specifications can be used to geospatially enable interoperable Web based applications and portals. These applications or portals can provide either free or available-for-fee services and data that are widely available to Web users.
A small but perfectly-formed victory from the Associazione per il Software Libero:On february the 21st 2006 the Italian Ministry of Work and Social Politics - Department of Technological Innovation published in the Official Journal of the Italian Republic n. 43 a call for tenders for the supply of an amount of Euro 4.539.184,55 of Microsoft software licenses.
This call for tenders allowed to participate only resellers qualified by Microsoft as "Large Account Resellers": just 11 Italian companies comply with this.
According to Italian law, before buying software Public Administrations have to compare all available options, including free software.
In this case such evaluation was omitted and free competition principles were violated: just resellers of one company's products were allowed to compete.
For this reason "Associazione per il Software Libero" decided to appeal this call for tenders before the court (Regional Administrative Tribunal of Lazio-Rome) filing case n. 3838/2006.
Press Release
There is no need to wait for the final decision in the case promoted by the Associazione per il Software Libero against the Ministry of Work and Social Politics before the Administrative Tribunal of Lazio Region appealing the call for tenders for the supply of Microsoft software licenses.
The Ministry withdrawn the call for tenders with act of annullment.
Evviva!
Microsoft must be either really desperate or desperately out of touch with both reality and the prevailing perceptions of its actions if it can allow one of its apologists to write stuff like this:With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I thought the days of property expropriation in Europe were over. Now I wonder, following the European Commission's latest policy twist in its interminable case against Microsoft.
To say nothing of this:This is not a dispute about the goal of interoperability, as such. At the limit, Microsoft's detractors and many of its competitors would only be satisfied with disclosures that allowed them to clone its software outright, free of charge. Formally, of course, this is not on the table. But the unilateral voiding of standard intellectual property rights, coupled with nominal royalties for a company's innovation and knowhow, are a close approximation.
Well, no, actually: it is all about interoperability. People want access to the APIs - the surface of the black box - so that the innards can be recreated using completely different code, not "cloned".
What's heartening is the generally intelligent level of comments on what is a sadly unsubtle piece of puffery.
It would have been more appropriate had this come out on April 1st:If you agree that Open XML should be approved as an ISO standard please sign this petition, which we will send to the Chairman of the British Standards Institute to demonstrate broad support for this initiative in the UK.
Yours faithfully,
Nick McGrath
Director of Platform Strategy
Microsoft Ltd
This is basically trying to strong-arm the BSI into supporting Microsoft's pseudo-standard by soliciting the public's help through the following statements:
• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
So, let's just take a look at some of these, shall we?
First, note that Microsoft Open XML has suddenly morphed into that terribly neutral and official-looking Ecma Open XML: who could possibly have anything against that?• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of the code these contributed. I'd bet it was something like 99.99% Microsoft's work. This was why it was foolish for institutions like the British Library to lend their name: it was bound to be hijacked in this way.• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
Sorry, Nick, that's a bug, not a feature: backward compatibility has led to elephantiasis in the documentation - all 6000 pages of it - which makes it effectively unusable for anyone except Microsoft. What a coincidence.• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
See the previous comment. And oh yes, we know that Microsoft really loves to share its proprietary standards: just ask the European Commission, or Novell, for example.
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
Er, interoperability with what - itself? There will never be a full independent implementation of Microsoft's file format (see above, again). Or perhaps Nick was thinking of interoperability with other XML-based office standards: unfortunately, the way those 6000 pages define Microsoft's format, true interoperability seems a merely theoretical prospect. And note the cunning last line - "supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices" - which implies that this is something special. That was true in the past, but things move on, Nick, and ODF offers it too, now.
Given the fact that the company emphasises how keen it is to respond to users' wishes, what I want to know is why there isn't somewhere where we can petition Microsoft to drop its format entirely, and simply switch to the real open office standard, OpenDocument Format, which more and more governments and companies are supporting.
Now that's something I'd sit up and beg for. (Via The Reg.)
This is a seriously bad move:Online fantasy world "Second Life" will soon introduce the virtual equivalent of vanity plates, allowing residents to customize their characters' first and last names.
"Second Life" spokesman Alex Yenni said the feature, likely to cost $100 up front and $50 a year, would debut by the end of the year.
Domain squatting is bad enough: at least there it's something abstract like a Web site. But if someone steals your real name in a virtual world and, shall we say, besmirches it, there's no way you can prove in-world it's not "really" you, no way to reverse the damage to your reputation both in-world and beyond. And as we know, in the Web 2.0 world, reputation is everything.
If Linden Lab is stupid enough to bring this in, it can mean only one thing: that it is really hard-up for dosh. For the first time, I have my doubts about its long-term survival.
I am not a Twitterer, but I am the sad kind of person who enjoys watching defragmentation utilities as they bring order to my hard disc chaos. So it's perhaps no surprise that I find Twittervision utterly engrossing:What is Twittervision?
A real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. Samuel Morse, meet Carl Jung.
What makes Twittervision so compelling for me is that it is like eavesdropping on the whole world, as random thoughts bubble up hither and thither. It's also an extremely cool mashup, as Twitter posts pop up in their respective geographic positions, and the world-map shifts constantly in a vain attempt to keep up.
Wonderful (via Virtual China.)
Last year, I wrote about the interesting idea of offering a nearly-free computer as an extra to a broadband connection. Inevitably, the "Easy Neuf" was based on GNU/Linux - how else could you afford to do this kind of project? Now the International Herald Tribune has caught up with the story, and offers some more details, as well as a picture of the very 60s-looking beast:"The choice of open source was both for price and motivation," Charrier said. "We pay no licensing fee for the software, and engineers feel motivated to work on a new kind of project that helps the open-source community."
The choice has been hailed by April, an advocacy group for free and open-source software. "This is the first time that a company offers open-source software in a mass consumption product that has a help desk to assist customers," said Benjamin Drieu, treasurer of April, who also works for a company involved in the Neuf project.
"Normally, only programmers have the confidence to use open source, so this could change the perception of free software."
The suite of open-source software on the Easy Neuf includes the Firefox browser, Abiword word processor and the Gnumeric spreadsheet program.
Here are some wise words on EMI's move to sell its entire catalogue without DRM:Reindorp said the move could help Microsoft's effort, loosening the tight bonds between the iTunes store and the iPod.
"This does open things up a little bit," Reindorp said. "It potentially makes the competition more on a device-to-device or service-to-service basis. It will force the various services to really innovate."
Hmmm: now that's interesting. Microsoft reckons that opening things up is a good thing, because it will help it fight Apple on the basis of innovation. So how about if we "opened up" office formats, by opting for the vendor-neutral ODF?
One of the key moments in the rise of open source was IBM's announcement on 10 January 2000 that it would be supporting GNU/Linux across all its hardware. This seal of approval from Big Blue suddenly made free software respectable.
A the time of writing Rebel Code, I spoke to several people from IBM, all of whom seemed really clued up about the deeper implications of open source, how and why it worked, and how companies could work with it and benefit from it. I was really impressed.
And now I read this:"At some point you become so shrill and beyond what's required that you lose the audience and the audience moves on to something else," he said.
"We'll have to see what finally evolves through the [GPL] process, it's going through an update and the Free Software Foundation has a particular view of free software. Free software is a wonderful thing but there's also a business model."
"We think there are other licensing techniques, the Apache license and others are somewhat less onerous. We use them ourselves. We don't use the GPL for reasons of its restrictions," Mills said.
That was Steve Mills, as in IBM Software General Manager. Seems like the message hasn't quite got through there, Steve. Pity: I obviously need to revise my view of IBM.
...and pathetic.
When a company starts harassing someone in this way, you can tell they've given up hope. On the basis of what's happened so far, I don't expect the management of SCO to be ashamed, but I do wonder what the lawyers involved see when they look in the mirror.
One of the great things about open genomics - or bioinformatics if you prefer its traditional name - is that it provides a completely objective resolution of all sorts of emotional disputes.
For example, by feeding genomic sequences of various organisms into a computer program, you can produce a tree of life that is remarkably similar to the ones proposed by traditional evolutionary biology. But in this case, there is no subjective judgement: just pure number crunching (although it's worth noting that the trees vary according to the depth of the calculations, so this is not absolute knowledge, only an ever-closer approximation thereto).
Another case in point is the closeness of the relationship between the great apes and humans. Indeed, it is only human arrogance that allows that kind of distinction to be made: a computer would lump them all together on the basis of their DNA.
Against this background, it's surprising how much we naked apes cling to our difference from the hairy kinds: perhaps it makes us feel a little better in the face of the genocide that we are waging against them. However, it looks like things here might be changing at last:
He recognises himself in the mirror, plays hide-and-seek and breaks into fits of giggles when tickled. He is also our closest evolutionary cousin.
A group of world leading primatologists argue that this is proof enough that Hiasl, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, deserves to be treated like a human. In a test case in Austria, campaigners are seeking to ditch the 'species barrier' and have taken Hiasl's case to court. If Hiasl is granted human status - and the rights that go with it - it will signal a victory for other primate species and unleash a wave of similar cases.
...
One of their central arguments will be that a chimpanzee's DNA is 96-98.4 per cent similar to that of humans - closer than the relationship between donkeys and horses.
Sadly, there's a terrible race here: which will we see first - apes recognised as near-equals, or apes razed from the face of the earth? (Via Slashdot.)
Here's a depressing little document:Patents are a driving force for promoting innovation, growth and competitiveness.
...
It is suggested, moreover, that there is a correlation between the use of intellectual property rights and good innovation performance.
Mind you, given that this is a product of Charlie "Microsoft is my darling" McCreevy, it's little wonder that it's full of such arrant nonsense.
For anyone in Swinging London 2.0 next Wednesday, the place to be is the Open Rights Group party:It will be a night of public domain and openly licensed music, remixed visuals and free culture goodie bags, with an uber-geek raffle which includes the opportunity to be written in to Cory Doctorow's next book, or receive a signed keyboard from our patron Neil Gaiman. Danny O'Brien, who founded the ORG pledge, will be speaking.
And if you were wondering,The Open Rights Group is a new and fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform.
All things that are likely to be dear to readers of these pages.
Mozilla Labs are working on the Coop:The Coop will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.
Users will see their friends' faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person's recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend's face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend's face glows to get the user's attention.
Makes sense, if you're into that sort of thing. Can't see much space for Flock in the Coop, though. However, choice is good. (Via TechCrunch.)
Here's a paradigmatic tale:The editors who were fired or resigned over the editorial-independence controversy at the Canadian Medical Association Journal have reunited to start their own free, online medical journal.
Open Medicine will be a peer-reviewed, independent open-access journal that does not accept advertising from pharmaceutical or medical-device companies.
Until now, the big publishing houses have held all the cards: do it our way, or you don't do it. No longer. If you don't like it, leave and start your own.
The issues at stake are important:As a medical librarian, I believe that information (in all its forms, good and bad) is central to human health.
It is also essential to the health of democracies. Without free, open access to information - particularly from a global perspective - our freedoms are limited, and more specifically physicians are unable to practice evidence-based medicine.
So EUPL - the European Union Public Licence - is now approved, by the European Commission at least:
The Commission has approved the EUPL on 9 January 2007, as a licence to be used for the distribution of software developed in the framework of the IDABC programme.
The only trouble is, it's not actually on the list of OSI-approved licences. This leaves it precisely where...? (Via Andrew Katz.)
As I've written elsewhere, licences are not peripheral to free software, they lie at its very heart. So argy-bargy over the new draft of GNU GPLv3 was bound to bring some interesting further developments, and that's what we have here:the strategy of the FSF is simple (I am paraphrasing here, nobody said these exact words to me):
1. FACT: we simply could not get GPLv3 out with the ASP provision or it would have been DOA. It is hard to disagree...
2. TRICK: we are creating another specific license that includes the ASP provision (AGPLv2) and we added in GPLv3 that the two will be compatible. The end result is license proliferation, but not license incompatibility which is the key issue.
3. GOAL: GET AGPL TO BE THE REAL NEXT GPL
Aside from its intrinsic interest, there is a good reason for observing closely what happens to content in Australia. Because of the Free Trade Act kit passed, Australia is imposing many of the US's most stupid legal instruments in this domain; how content fares under this regime could well serve as a warning for all those other countries contemplating similar moves.
The best place to find out about content down under is the book Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, which brings together a couple of dozen papers from a conference that took place a couple of years ago (what took so long?). As well as the always-entertaining Lessig trot down copyright's memory lane, there's plenty about the particularities of Australian law and practice, as well as an unusual section on computer games and law. It's available as a free PDF.
This is what we've been waiting for:
EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI's existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players.
The tracks are a little pricey:
Apple's iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI's new premium downloads. Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. Consumers who have already purchased standard tracks or albums with DRM will be able to upgrade their digital music for $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track. All EMI music videos will also be available on the iTunes Store DRM-free with no change in price.
but that's not the point. A taboo has been broken, and things will never be the same again in the world of digital content.
Now that the code for the Second Life client is available as open source, I wondered who would be the first to offer a how-to. And the winner is...Peter Seebach:In this series, I introduce the client (or "viewer" in Linden terminology) and explore the development environment, documentation, and more. Developers who are used to an open source environment are sometimes a little put off by things that might be done differently in a commercial environment, and this project offers a number of opportunities to explore some of the tradeoffs. Of course, the best way to explore a program is to do something with it, so this series gets into the code to make a few changes.
These guys were the new philosophers, and they had discovered a way to be involved in the latest technologies of the day, and not just from an engineering perspective, but from the perspective of how that technology would change our lives and possibly even the nature of humanity. Having that sort of knowledge, being in a position to see and grasp something like that is heady stuff, and in my heart of hearts I really think that all the money – the hundreds of millions of dollars – is just game currency to these guys. It keeps them in the game and if you are winning the game you get to be intimately involved in the companies that are rewiring our minds and our communities and changing the nature of humanity itself.
Er, what took so long?
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