Microsoft's Gambit: Patently About Patents

Well, I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so:

Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics (LGE) today announced that they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement to further the development of the companies' current and future product lines. Microsoft has focused on patent agreements in the recent past to develop a best-practices model for protecting intellectual property (IP) and respecting the IP rights of others, as well as building bridges with an array of industry leaders, including consumer electronics, telecommunications and computer hardware providers.

This is partly why we desperately need to sort out the mess that is intellectual property, especially in the US.

Cool Earth Meltdown

I was going to write about Cool Earth before, but the site went down. This is both good and bad news. Bad, because it suggests a lack of planning on the part of the people behind the site, and good because it was caused by the unexpectedly large influx of people wanting to visit and participate.

That's a particularly good sign because the whole idea is about letting ordinary people make a difference to global warming by helping to keep carbon sequestered in the rainforests. Agreed, this is not as good as actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but given all the collateral benefits of preserving rainforests, it would be churlish to complain.

Moreover, Cool Earth seems to be recognise that preserving the rainforests is not about surrounding it with barbed wire to keep the baddies out: the local people - the goodies - must not only be taken into account, but actively involved so that they feel it is in their interests to protect rather than exploit by cutting down. Sustainability of this kind is hard to do well, but better than the current alternative.

The other key thing about Cool Earth is that it allows people who chip in to monitor their "bit" of the rainforest using Google Earth (and what a godsend that is in this context). This is absolutely crucial - not so much in terms of checking whether somebody's about to cut it down, since by then it's probably too late, but in allowing donors to feel connected. Without that feedback loop, you don't generate engagement, and the whole thing will just fizzle out.

I've no idea whether Cool Earth will make a difference or turn out to be a total flop. But it's an idea worth supporting (I'm certainly going to sign up for a few trees) - for everyone's sake.

The GNU GPL Is Dead - Not

Bizarre:

The FSF should realize by now their influence is waning. Look at the plethora of alternative licenses. Now they’re really hamstringing themselves with Version 3, taking the license further and further from where industry developers are heading. Developers are still the heart of the open source community, and their support is integral to success. Are provisions concerned with patents and digital rights management really what developers want to see addressed? Do they care when Eben Moglen says "the time is rapidly approaching when the GPL is capable of leveling the monopolist to the ground?" Developers demand more freedom, not less. They want clear, practical leadership, not bombast.

Er, well, no, actually: more and more companies are adopting the GNU GPL; indeed, many that started out with dual licensing end up using just the GPL (for the full half-hour argument see hier.) The plethora of other licences represent background noise in comparison.

What's interesting is how, after years in the wilderness, RMS, the GNU GPL and the FSF all find themselves at the centre of so many debates around freedom and openness - not because they've moved there, but because the debates have moved to them.

Gaussian vs. Paretian Thinking

Hm, nice:

From my personal experience with the nearly complete lack of interest within big government bureaucracies for Paretian thinking that is far more explanatory, actionable, and predictive than what they currently produce, I don't think we will unless we develop it outside the traditional public organizations. In that sense, we will all need to become global guerrillas.

Paretian thinking is essentially open, distributed thinking....

Winds of Change at the WTO?

OK, this might not seem much, but the fact that it's being discussed at all is something of an achievement:

The proposal for a new five-paragraph Article 29bis to the WTO’s 1994 TRIPS agreement, aims at protecting biodiversity particularly found in developing countries by making it mandatory for patent applicants to reveal where they obtained the biological resources or traditional knowledge in question, and to ensure fair and equitable benefit-sharing of commercial uses, as well as legal requirements in the providing country for prior informed consent to access the resources.

Now we need to move further by turning the WTO into a forum not about protecting intellectual monopolies, but about balancing them with various kinds of intellectual commons.

Open Cities Toronto 2007

Open Cities Toronto 2007 is a weekend-long web of conversation and celebration that asks: how do we collaboratively add more open to the urban landscape we share? What happens when people working on open source, public space, open content, mash up art, and open business work together? How do we make Toronto a magnet for people playing with the open meme?

Sounds my sort of place. (Via Boing Boing.)

DRM's Good Side

Well, sort of:

Although DRM has failed to accomplish its main goal (stopping piracy), it has been successful at bringing people from every corner of the globe together... in their hatred for DRM. Loathing for the technology has reached such a pitch that consumers around the world no longer whine only in the privacy of homes and apartments. They're taking to the streets, organizing marches and rallies and teaching events to educate the unenlightened. The newest campaign is in South America, where the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS) at a Brazilian law school has joined forces with consumer group Idec to mount an anti-DRM campaign of its own.

Ecological Economics and the Commons

Heavy but important stuff here:

some resources should be part of the commons because their physical attributes mean that common ownership and democratic allocation will be more sustainable, just and efficient than private ownership and market allocation. Information, which will play a critical role in solving the serious ecological problems we currently face, is one of those resources. So too are most ecosystem services. The fact is that conventional markets based on private property rights do not work to solve the macro-allocation problem, which in recent decades has become far more important than the micro-allocation problem. Solving this problem instead requires a system based on common property rights and democratic decision making concerning the desirable provision of ecosystem services.

Google Points Finger at Microsoft IIS

Interesting bit of shin-kicking here:

Web sites running Microsoft Corp.'s Web server software are twice as likely to be hosting malicious code as other Web sites, according to research from Google Inc.

Last month, Google's Anti-Malware team looked at 70,000 domains that were either distributing malware or hosting attack code. "Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often as a malware-distributing server," wrote Google's Nagendra Modadugu, in a Tuesday blog posting.

Together, IIS (Internet Information Services) and Apache servers host about 89 percent of all Web sites, but collectively they're responsible for 98 percent of all Web-based malware. Google actually found an equal number of Apache and IIS Web sites hosting malicious software, but because there are so many more sites hosted by Apache servers (66 percent versus Microsoft's 23 percent) malicious sites make up a much larger percentage of all IIS servers.

RMS Supports CC

One of the unfortunate schisms in the open world has just been healed. The Creative Commons' decision to drop the Developing Nations licence means that RMS now supports the initiative:

This is a big step forward, and I can now support CC.

Movable Type Moves to Open Source

Good news for the world of blogging - and beyond:

Moveable Type 4.0 is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3.0 in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting announcement: SixApart will open source Movable Type before the end of the third quarter.

There's already a website for the imminent open source community, too:

Movable Type Open Source, or MTOS, is the open source project that will consist of a GPL-licensed version of Movable Type 4.0, to be released in Q3 2007, and resources for the already large community of Movable Type developers, hosted at www.movabletype.org/opensource.

OA vs. Political and Selective Use of Data

Here's a great - and sadly necessary - piece of analysis:

Throughout the first half of 2007, the White House has falsely claimed that the United States is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This claim was officially made by the White House on February 7 and has been repeated in various forms by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton, and Science Advisor to the President John Marburger, most recently on May 31, 2007.1 The White House is misusing science and data to make this claim, as the Pacific Institute first pointed out on March 8.2 The White House can only back up this claim by looking at a single greenhouse gas over a narrow timeline. Looking at the full range of gases over a longer period, the conclusion reverses completely: the European Union is curbing greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively and successfully than the United States.

And why can they say that? Because of open access to data: the antidote to the political and selective use of data is more data. It's no coincidence that the source of much of that data in the US, the EPA, is effectively being dismantled, and its hitherto open data made effectively inaccessible so that it can't be used in precisely this way. (Via Slashdot.)

Open Access Trumps Developing Nations Licence

In a significant announcement, the Creative Commons organisation has said that it is retiring the Developing Nations licence:

The Developing Nations license is in conflict with the growing “Open Access Publishing” movement. While the license frees creative work in the developing nations, it does not free work in any way elsewhere. This means these licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the Open Access Movement. Because this movement is so important to the spread of science and knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to promote a stand alone version of this license.

This move is an interesting indication of the growing ability of open access to define the terms of the debate about open content.

A Series of Tubes

Now this is what I call a real distribution network:

The London Book Project is a free book exchange on a massive scale. Using the London Underground as a high speed distribution network, we aim to bring real literature to London's commuters. Scrap the freesheets - read a free book instead!

Over the next two weeks we'll be distributing thousands of second hand books across the tube and we want YOU to get involved. If you see one of our books, please pick it up! Then read it and replace with any book of your choice. Let's make the tube a giant, free library! Meanwhile, browse our website to find out more about the London Book Project and some alternative reporting about the world's most diverse capital city.

(Via Boing Boing.)

No Xmas Cards for Xandros

Well, it looks like the world of free software can cross another company off its Christmas card list:

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros announced on Monday a technical and legal collaboration, the latest step in the software giant's ongoing program to partner with open-source companies.

Over the next five years, the two companies said, they will work on improving interoperability between their servers to improve systems management.

The pact calls for Microsoft to provide patent covenants for Xandros customers that ensure they are not infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property, according to the companies.

Er, didn't another company recently do something similar? With rather negative consequences...?

Web 2.0 Start-ups by Numbers

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Guy Kawasaki, but these figures about his new Truemors site are interesting, not least this one:

7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

Life is indeed good because of open source - it's holding up practically the entire Web 2.0 edifice.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Openness

How's this for a stunning demonstration that the UK Government has something to hide on ID cards?

Treasury officials are ordering the immediate destruction of "Gateway" internal reports into risky government IT schemes to prevent information on the projects being leaked.

...

The order for the destruction of final reports will fuel suspicion that they identify fundamental flaws in some major government IT-based projects.

The paper also tells civil servants they must securely dispose immediately after delivery of the final Gateway report “all supporting documents”.

The Information Commissioner ruled last year that early Gateway reviews on ID cards should be published, arguing that it should be public knowledge whether the programme was feasible and being well managed. The OGC appealed – and lost. It is now to fund a third appeal hearing, this time to the High Court.

Openness? We don't need no stinkin' openness.

You'd Be Nuts Not To...

Bill Hooker points out that there is an important petition to establish a self-archiving open access mandate for Brazilian research circulating - and that anyone may sign it. So why not join in (Bill's post has a translation)?

Taking Liberties...

...With openness and much, much else.

Spread the word.

Open Source Policing

Is this perhaps one answer to open source war/criminality?

Waleli's idea is to harness the power of picture messaging (MMS) to catch the crooks. A witness sends a photo or video from the cameraphone using MMS-witness which then goes straight into a crime database.

...

Given that Garner has estimated that there are 295 million cameraphones already out there, that's an awful lot of potential crime scene photographers.

Visualising DRM

Having problems getting your head around that tricky concept of DRM? Try this. (Via Boing Boing.)

GNU GPLv3 - Nearly There

The final draft of the GNU GPLv3 is out, together with copious explanations. If it's just a little too copious, you might try Matthew Aslett's excellent analysis of what it is all likely to mean for the Novell-Microsoft deal.

Maybe Genomics is Getting a Little Too Personal

So Jim Watson's genome will soon be made public. But not all of it:

the only deliberate omission from Watson's sequence is that of a gene linked to Alzheimer's disease, which Watson, who is now 79, asked not to know about because it is incurable and claimed one of his grandmothers.

The trouble is, the better our bioinformatics gets, the more genes we will be able to analyse usefully, and the better our ability to make statistical predictions from them. Which means that more and more people will be snipping bits out of their public genomes in this way. And which also means that many of us will never put any of our genome online.

Reed-Elsevier to Pull Out of Arms Fairs

Well, since I've criticised my old employer Reed-Elsevier in the past for having blood on its corporate hands through its involvement in the shame that is the arms trade, it's only fair that I should point out and applaud the following news:

Reed said earlier it would sever its ties to arms fairs, bowing to pressure which included complaints from customers, shareholders and academics writing for its major titles.

What's interesting, of course, is that this is as a direct result of cumulative pressure applied from all sorts of quarters. See, o ye sceptics, this people-based stuff can work.

Virtual GNU/Linux

Virtual Windows systems are familiar enough, but how about this: LINA, a virtual GNU/Linux environment?

With LINA, a single executable written and compiled for Linux can be run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems.

Released under the GNU GPLv2, LINA sounds pretty interesting. Due out this month. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)