Not, alas, open source as far as I can tell:IBM Lotus Quickr is team collaboration software that helps you share content, collaborate and work faster online with your teams -- inside or outside firewall.
Interesting not just for its adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, but its anointing of the Flickr naming meme. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)
For over a decade, it has been a point of faith that Apache is not only a better Web server than Microsoft's IIS, but that this is demonstrable: the Netcraft survey of public Web servers shows that Apache has been consistently ahead.
Alas, for a variety of reasons - not least Microsoft's determination to reduce the gap, whatever the cost - Apache's lead is falling. So it's good to have this new survey that re-asserts Apache's superiority, and adds a nice extra twist:Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. Research by WatchMouse, a website monitoring company, also shows that web server platform Apache outperforms the Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore, having a Linux website and an Apache webserver platform offers the best choice for professional web pages.
I feel another Microsoft-funded piece of research on its way....
I and many others have written about the need for economic goods to include all the real costs of production - including environmental costs. Here's a great demonstration of what goes wrong if you don't:"The West moved its manufacturing base to China knowing it was vastly more polluting than Japan, Europe or the US," he added.
"No environmental conditions were attached to this move; in fact the only thing manufacturers were interested in was the price of labour.
"This trend kept the price of our products down but at the cost of soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Long term, this policy has been a climate disaster.
Nominal price goes down, environmental cost goes up. If the latter were factored in, China would not be so eager to employ production techniques that poison its own land and people.
I've written about the spat between the US and Antigua before, but it looks like things are getting really heavy:And so, today, what is expected to become a parade of countries demanding sanctions against the United States as a result of its refusal to comply with WTO rulings on gambling services began to form, as Japan and India piled it on with more demands for compensation. Every other signatory affected will have a right to demand sanctions, and those sanctions may, depending on the circumstances, be applied against any American industry, from automobiles to semiconductors.
Something's got to give: I wonder what it will be.
Well, sort of:Wind River Systems, Inc., the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), today announced that it has been selected by Honeywell Aerospace to support the development of NASA's New Millennium Program Space Technology 8 (ST8) Dependable Multiprocessor. The contract marks the first time a Linux platform has been selected by Honeywell for a space mission. Honeywell Aerospace is the prime contractor for NASA's ST8 Dependable Multiprocessor project. Wind River® Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the underlying operating system to support the processing of science and experiment data onboard the ST8 spacecraft.
What's ironic here is that Wind River was once one of the biggest sceptics about open source in these kind of mission-critical situations. How times change. How times will change. (Via DaniWeb.)
...the New Great Lie is the beginning of a larger attempt by traditional content owners to put the genie back in the bottle. Here's some more of the same:Wright praised Cotton's work with the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, work that drew criticism after Cotton suggested that US law enforcement resources were "misaligned" and that too much energy and money was spent stopping burglaries and bank robberies and not enough spent on piracy prevention. Cotton's plan is a "groundbreaking and far-reaching set of proposals," according to Wright, who made clear that the full power of GE was behind the plan.
Kudos:An online calculator that enables people to work out their carbon footprint was launched by Environment Secretary, David Miliband today.
Defra’s Act on CO2 calculator is designed to increase understanding of the link between individual action and climate change, through carbon dioxide emissions. It also raises awareness of the different actions people can take in their everyday lives to help tackle climate change.
Double kudos:The software that runs the calculator, complete with the Government data, will be made freely available under general public licence. This will enable others wanting to use the software to power their own calculators, using their own branding.
Wow: open source and open data. (Via Open Source Weblog.)
I wrote recently about Microsoft's amazing Photosynth demo, which shows pictures of Notre-Dame taken from Flickr stitched together automatically to produce a three-dimensional model that you can zoom into in just about any way.
Then I read this:Madeleine McCann's parents will appeal to Irish tourists to check holiday snaps for clues - while the flat their child was abducted from reportedly sold for half price.
Madeleine's parents Kate McCann, 38, and Gerry, 39, will appear on television to ask anyone who took a trip to Portugal in early May to send photos to British investigators.
It occurred to me that what we really need is a system that can take these holiday snaps and put them together in time to create a four-dimensional model that can be explored by the police - a new kind of crowdsourced sousveillance.
Given that Photosynth is still experimental, we're probably some way off this. I'd also have concerns about handing over all this information to the authorities without better controls on what would be done with it (look what's happening with the UK's DNA database.)
Well, that's what it says here:The concept involves comedians driving around Europe and users (viewers) can decide where they go and what they do. In Where Are the Joneses comdedians drive around, trying to find their fictional siblings.
Users have a full arsenal of ‘open tools’ to engage with the site and campaign: a wiki to influence the script and also a twitter integration.
This is the best introduction to virtual worlds so far: comprehensive, link-rich, and well written. Do read it if you can - it's time well spent.
Good point here about a big problem with the apparently welcome Peer to Patent project:Helping patent trolls with their QA is like going through bandits' ammunition and throwing out the dud rounds for them before they try to rob you.
And sensible advice, too:
If you have Prior Art, print it out and put it in your safe deposit box. Make sure that the source is verifiable, but don't tell anyone what the source is. Don't say it's from "the June 1997 login;" or "comp.sources.unix in May 1986". If you want, borrow a tactic from Tim O'Reilly and tell people that you have prior art for a certain patent, but don't give attackers any more information than you have to.
More generally, perhaps the free software community should set up a shadow scheme that tracks all of these patent applications, and works to find prior art, which it then stores safely against a rainy day.
Following the recent launch of Fedora 7, I spoke to Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, about how Fedora and Red Hat work together, and what lies ahead.
Glyn Moody: What's the nature of the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat?
Max Spevack: It's very symbiotic, obviously, because Red Hat offers significant financial support to the Fedora Project. I really believe that the Fedora Project represents sort of the soul of Red Hat. It's the place where, as a company, Red Hat devotes its effort to truly working with and embracing the larger open source community, and giving power and access to the distribution, to the engineers and programmers and contributors who are not a part of Red Hat.
At the same time, Fedora represents, from an engineer's perspective, an upstream for all of Red Hat's other products; like, for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is built about every two years. Fedora is a distribution that we try to release twice a year, and we try to always focus on the things that are important to the larger Fedora community, while at the same time allowing Fedora to be a place where things that Red Hat engineering groups are working on can also make their way into the distribution.
Glyn Moody: What about the day-to-day dynamics: to what extent do people at Red Hat say, "Gosh, we'd really like this particular feature at some point. How about working on it?"
Max Spevack: When we try to sit down and plan out what a version of Fedora is going to look like and start to make a feature list of thing we'd like to get into any given version of Fedora, one of the groups that we go and talk to is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product guys and engineering managers. And we say, "Well, what are the things that your teams are working on that you would like us to include in, say, Fedora 6 or Fedora 7 or Fedora 8, based on when you think certain things are going to be ready?" And so that is one person that we talk to.
And then, at the same time, we go out to the larger Fedora community and we say, on our public mailing lists and on our wiki: "We want to try to put together a release of Fedora that'll come out five months from now. What are some of the features that you guys think are important? Or what are some of the places that you think need more work?"
And we get that whole list, and then we can kind of build out and say, "Well, all right, here's the thing that Red Hat wanted to work on. And, well, Red Hat's got five guys working on it, so that's taken care of. The community was asking for X, Y, and Z. And, well, there's a programmer in the community who has volunteered to lead the development of that feature, and so it's going to happen."
"This other feature is something that everyone thinks would be great, but there isn't really anyone with free time to work on it, so let's go and talk to the Red Hat management and see if we can maybe find an engineer who can get some of their time to spend working on that feature."
Glyn Moody: Is there ever a tension between what Red Hat wants to do and what your community wants to do.
Max Spevack: Well, it comes in cycles. I would say 90 percent of what's in Fedora 7 is all stuff that's really, really important to the Fedora community. Part of the reason why that was possible for Fedora 7 is because RHEL 5 was just released a few months ago, and so there isn't really any new RHEL kind of stuff ready to go yet, because that's a two-year release cycle.
If you back up, though, six months, to when we were finishing Fedora Core 6, Fedora Core 6 was the last version of Fedora that was coming out before a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. RHEL 5 was based very significantly off of the Fedora Core 6 upstream, and so if you look at the development cycle leading up to Fedora Core 6, I would say that it was slightly less community-focused and slightly more Red Hat-focused.
And so the give and take happens based on where we are in relation to a Fedora Release and a RHEL release, and how their two-year release cycle and our six-month release cycle overlap with each other.
Glyn Moody: What kind of developer wants to work on Fedora rather than on one of the other distros?
Max Spevack: What Fedora offers that I think a lot of other folks don't at this point in time is the complete transparency into the entire build process. What I mean by that is everything, from you writing your code and checking it into CVS, through your code going into the build system and producing an RPM, to a compose tool taking a whole collection of RPMs from various repositories and turning those into an actual CD or installable tree - every step along that path is completely free software, is completely external and community-based. And anybody in the world can use that same toolchain, or work from it, to build a version of Fedora that is completely customized to their environment.
[For] the older versions of Fedora, the Fedora code was in two different repository. One repository was the one that was owned by the community, and the other repository was the one that was owned by Red Hat, and we didn't like that. And we have blown that whole idea up, in Fedora 7, and turned it all into one community-owned repository, which is what has allowed us to then also make sure that all the tools that build the distribution out of that repository are also completely community-owned.
Glyn Moody: It sounds to me, to paraphrase a little bit what you're saying, that you've moved towards the Debian model and taken, in many ways, the best bits of their approach. But you have the advantage, which perhaps they don't have, in having a company with reasonably deep pockets behind you, as well. Would that be fair?
Max Spevack: I think that is a pretty good way to look at it. Certainly, having Red Hat as a big corporate sponsor of what we do with Fedora doesn't hurt, because it helps us make sure we have the ability to hire the best contributors to Fedora every now and then.
Over the last year or so, we've hired probably three or four of some of the leading community contributors to Fedora, and we've said, "By the way, we've noticed that over the last two years you've spent 30 hours a week - somehow, in your spare time, when you're not doing your actual job - working on Fedora. What do you say we give you a paycheck and let you spend 50 hours a week doing it just for us?”
Glyn Moody: Looking forward a little, how do you see Fedora evolving?
Max Spevack: There's a few things that I see happening in the next nine or 12 months. All of the change that we have put in the last six months into the Fedora is going to need a little time to let the dust settle on it. As people start to use some of these tools more frequently, there's going to be complaints, and we're going to make them better.
I think there is a lot of potential in the live CD arena. One of the things we have got working for Fedora 7 is the live USB key, where you can put the whole distro on a USB key and boot it up. I think that there's a lot of work to be done there to make that feel a little more like a full product - making sure that the extra space on that USB key can be encrypted, making it really easy to upgrade.
Glyn Moody: What about things like support? Outside Red Hat, what structures do you have in place for directly supporting your users?
Max Spevack: The main way of getting support for Fedora is the Fedora community. It's the Fedora mailing lists; FedoraForum.org, which gets tons and tons of traffic; Fedora IRC. It's a very grassroots kind of support structure right now.
I think there is definitely a space there to offer a more formalized support of Fedora. And when I make my own personal list of goals that aren't engineering related, for Fedora, that's certainly one of the ones that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. Is there a way that we - meaning Red Hat or the Fedora Project - can offer a more formal kind of support around Fedora? Even if it's like five bucks a month, is there a way we can see if there's people out there who would like a more formalized support of Fedora? And if there's a market for it, we can figure out a way to offer it.
Important news:The bottom line: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.
Good luck, Larry: whatever you do in your new field, I'm sure it's going to be pretty damn good.
This will end in tears:Although the ability to conduct a home DNA test and get the results with relative ease are tempting, the thought of sitting across the kitchen table with a distant cousin-husband may be little too weird to down with the morning coffee.
Signs of the times:As explained on BuzzMonitor's "about page" -- "Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it."
The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them.
Sounds cool:James Boyle ... announced that a new project, called “CC Learn”, has been launched, to work on lobbying all the open education projects to use open licenses, and to be interoperable and reusable. Hewlett has now funded this project, and a Director has been hired. I’ve got some inside information I can’t disclose (sigh) but I can say that there are really big things happening inside CC Learn and that they’re getting a huge amount of traction...
News that Granger is abandoning the sinking ship that is NHS Connecting for Health is hardly a surprise. The £12 billion project was doomed before it started, because it tried to apply an unworkable, 20th-century, closed-source software methodology - one that not only does not scale, but that actually gets worse the bigger the project (hello, Fred Brooks).
The only way to address these kind of mammoth undertakings is by using a lightly-coupled, decentralised approach. And that means open standards at a minimum, and ideally full-bore open source. The equation is simple: the more openness, the greater the scope for componentisation, the greater the flexibility - and the greater the chance the damn thing will actually work.
Sadly, NHS Connecting for Health will go down in history as the perfect demonstration of this fact. - Sadly, because I shall be paying for some of it.
I seem to be one of the few people on this planet unaffected by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field; indeed, I find the Fake Steve Jobs more, er, authentic. Desptie this, I have to confess I much enjoyed this Jobs profile by John Heilemann.
But in all its shrewd and witty analysis, it seems to miss the key thing about the iPhone: that it is not just expensive, but obscenely expensive in a world where many people earn less than $500 per year. In other words, the iPhone - rather like Jobs - is supremely narcissistic.
Perhaps that why Apple's products stick in my craw: with their self-assigned exclusivity and implicit sense of superiority, they are the antithesis of free software, which is inclusive and fundamentally egalitarian. The fact that MacOS is built on free software only adds insult to injury.
Another thought-provoking post from Jamais Cascio:In fact, the Book & Seed Vault may prove to function better as a model and instructions than as an actual vault. We'd need more than one site for any kind of disaster recovery system to be truly useful; we have to assume that many of the eventual locations will be unavailable, so the more the better. The right scale for something like this is probably the "community" -- a bit bigger than your neighborhood, but smaller than a city.
Think of it as open-source disaster prep -- a site and set of resources offering detailed instructions (which can be updated by the users, of course) showing you how to build a recovery vault for your community. What are the physical specs for the facility? Which seeds are appropriate for your regional climate? What are the key instruction manuals and guidebooks to include? How best to store and protect the vault's contents? I could see this done as a wiki and mailing list, probably with some YouTube videos demonstrating various techniques for proper seed and book storage.
As I've noted before, if WIPO is to avoiding turning into a huge ball on chain on the international community, it needs to change; specifically, it needs to rethink its attitude to intellectual monopolies, and embrace the larger idea of the intellectual commons.
Amazingly, there are some small signs that this is beginning to happen:Members of a World Intellectual Property Organization committee addressing proposals for a WIPO Development Agenda last week potentially rewrote the UN body’s mandate, pending approval.
Negotiators concluded a weeklong meeting with agreements on a wide range of proposals for new development-related activities - some hard to imagine for WIPO two years ago - and a recommendation to set up a new committee to implement the proposals.
“This is a major achievement,” said a participating official. “It’s a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society’s growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries.”
However, there is a rearguard action being fought against this by - guess who? - yup, the US:The United States, meanwhile, moved quickly to emphasise the inclusion of IP protection and that the recommendations are within the existing WIPO mandate. It also sought to tie the outcome to its hope for a renewed effort at harmonising national patent laws.
Fortunately, developing countries and emerging powers like Brazil are becoming sufficiently strong and self-confident to fight this kind of recidivism.
Interesting:Now's not the time to mince words, so let me just say it... we blew it.
Great piece by Mr Julian "Tiny Life" Dibbell about the gold farmers of China, and beyond:There was a lot of shouting involved, at least in the beginning. Besides the orders called out by the supervisors, there were loud attempts at coordination among the team members themselves. “But then we developed a sense of cooperation, and the shouting grew rarer,” Min said. “By the end, nothing needed to be said.” They moved through the dungeons in silent harmony, 40 intricately interdependent players, each the master of his part. For every fight in every dungeon, the hunters knew without asking exactly when to shoot and at what range; the priests had their healing spells down to a rhythm; wizards knew just how much damage to put in their combat spells.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez may be barking or worse (his totalitarian tendencies keep peeping out), but he's certainly innovative:The Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez announced the launch of their "Bolivarian Computers" last week, consisting of four different models produced in Venezuela with Chinese technology. The new computers will run the open-source Linux operating system and will first be used inside the government "missions" and state companies and institutions but eventually are expected to be sold across Venezuela and Latin America.
This will make Venezuela an interesting laboratory for the wider sale and use of GNU/Linux-based PCs within a country. (Via Slashdot.)
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