Firefox Fights On

Everybody knows that Firefox is one of open source's biggest success stories. What many may not know is that the story is not over:

OneStat.com (www.onestat.com), the number one provider of real-time web analytics, today reported that the global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is 12.72 percent. The global usage share increased 1.03 percent since January 2007. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 has a global usage share of 11.48 percent.

This is really significant, because it suggests that Firefox's rise is not simply a question of hardcore free software supporters switching, but rather a sustained move by some general users too. The question is, how long will it go on? (Via Tuxmachines.org.)

Blizzards and Beauty: An Ode to Open Access

Peter Suber has long been recognised as the official chronicler of the open access movement; now, with the publication of this paean, it seems he's become its bard as well:

I've heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a "gift of nature". Unfortunately, it's not quite within reach. But the non-rivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we've already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical or miraculous. But we do it every day now and it's losing its magic.

The danger is not that we already take it for granted but that might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. The point is not to marvel at its potential but to seize the opportunities it creates. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.

We take advantage of this gift when we post information online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the non-rivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.

More, Peter, more.

You Know Virtual Goods Are Real...

...when they have their own summit. (Via Virtual China.)

This is My 2000th Post

Apparently. Just thought I'd mention it.

The Industry Formerly Known as Music

Prince has always been ahead of the pack. Now he's doing it again:

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an "imminent" edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

"It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible," said Mail on Sunday managing director Stephen Miron. "This is the biggest innovation in newspaper promotions in recent times."

And as if that weren't a clear enough signal, try this:

Prince, whose Purple Rain sold more than 11m copies, also plans to give away a free copy of his latest album with tickets for his forthcoming concerts in London.

In other words, he recognises that CDs are now little more than marketing elements for promoting his personal appearances, which are where the real money is generated. Moreover, being purely analogue, the overall experience of attending concerts cannot be copied, unlike recordings of the music played during them.

Sadly, the Industry Formerly Known as Music just doesn't get it:

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

Now, it wouldn't be that somebody's scared witless of the looming threat of disintermediation, perchance?

The Birth of Blognation

I was a big fan of the Vecosys blog - I even got used to its horrible name. And then it went away, only to emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes, as something bigger and bolder: Blognation.

Blognation is certainly an ambitious”“Go Big or Go Home”” project, the aim being to report on the Web 2.0 startup ecosystem around the globe including, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South America, all with the help of 16+ blognation editors who are getting ready to start writing.

Today sees the launch of blognation UK and over the coming weeks and months all of the other aforementioned blogs will be launched. And proving that I certainly don’t lack ambition, I am currently speaking with a further 10 more prospective editors to cover Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, South Korea, South-East Asia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

Makes sense, but it depends critically on the quality of the blogger team that Sam Sethi has assembled. We shall see. At least the name is better than the previous one.

Catalonians of the World, Unite!

Good news: a Catalan translation of Rebel Code - Codi Rebel, no less - is hurtling towards a bookshop near you. Well, it is if you live in Catalonia. Here's the rousing peroration to keep you going until that happy day (probably a good few months off):

El GNU/Linux i els projectes de codi obert tracten del codi interior que està en les arrels de tot allò bo que tenim i que es rebel·la contra el pitjor que hi ha en nosaltres mateixos i que existirà mentre la humanitat perdure.

Brings tears to the eyes.

Up and At 'Em, Mappam

OpenStreetMap has always been one of my favourite open endeavours. It's a fine example of people getting fed up with official intransigence - in this case of the UK Government refusing to release public geodata - and getting off their bums to do something, rather than just whinge about it as others (like me) do.

So it's particularly gratifying to see that the chaps behind it are launching a geodata-related business, called Mappam:

Mappam helps you make money by adding relevant ads targeted to the exact place your visitors are browsing.

It's easy to set up and works with all the big web map services - Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, MultiMap and OpenStreetMap/OpenLayers.

Let's hope they've, er, found a way to make lots of dosh. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Wii Opens Up a Bit, We All Gain

Game consoles are notorious for being tightly-controlled, closed platforms. So this news, delivered en passant, is a rather significant vote for openness:

On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console.

...

while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility

Clearly, the company has recognised that the loss of control is more than outweighed by the benefit of establishing a flourishing ecosystem around the Wii.

Reputation Management in the Age of Google

Here's one good reason why you might want to blog:

At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings.

The solution? Fight negative Google hits with positive ones:

In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression.

Remember: if you don't manage your reputation online by participating, someone else might....

I Fear the Geeks Bearing "Lughenjo"

If you've been holding your breath while waiting to discover what The Economist's super-duper, top-secret, Web 2.0-y, skunkworks Project Red Stripe turned out to be, you may now exhale:

We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world.

Oh, right.

Well, at least those geeky Economist types have come up with an interesting code-name:

We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

Amazingly, neither Wikipedia nor Ethnologue, the definitive source of information about languages, knows anything about Tuvetan, but Webster's does. Anyone with more info?

Signs of the (Virtual) Times

The virtual world of EVE Online now has an official economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson:

Some of you may have read in various articles and interviews recently that CCP was bringing an economist on board to act as a sort of Alan Greenspan for the virtual world of EVE Online. That economist is me. So here comes a short intro and a bit about what I plan to do as a part of the EVE dev team.

...

In the real world, economic information is the cornerstone for our daily business; everyone takes note when news on inflation, production and interest rates are announced and traders try to predict beforehand what the news will be. There is a constant game between the market and authorities on predicting each other’s move and for that everyone needs information. Though EVE is a virtual world, the basic needs are the same. Players, designers and the company leaders at CCP will all benefit from having a central figure to monitor inflation and trends and provide a focused insight into what is happening within that virtual world so that everyone can make better decisions.

As the lead economist for EVE, my duties will include publishing economic information to the EVE-Online community. My duties will also be to coordinate research cooperation with academic institutions as the academic world has expressed quite an interest in doing research on this phenomenon (which shows how important MMOGs might become in future research into economic and human behavior).

(Via Virtual Economy Research Network.)

Open Source Life

Fascinating:

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

Porting the Genomic OS

The genome can be thought of as an operating system; it runs on the cell's hardware platform (which is generally created by the operating system in perhaps the most impressive kind of biological bootstrapping). An interesting question is whether you can port the genomic OS from one kind of hardware to another. The answer is "yes":

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI’s Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism’s genome with the other one’s genome.

The next stage is to hack the genomic OS:

The ability to transfer the naked DNA isolated from one species into a second microbial species paves the way for next experiments to transplant a fully synthetic bacterial chromosome into a living organism and if successful, “boot up” the new entity. There are many important applications of synthetic genomics research including development of new energy sources and as means to produce pharmaceuticals, chemicals or textiles.

It also allows all kinds of synthesised nasties, as the team behind the work recognise:

Dr. Venter and the team at JCVI continue to be concerned with the societal implications of their work and the field of synthetic genomics generally. As such, the Institute’s policy team, along with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a 15-month study to explore the risks and benefits of this emerging technology, as well as possible safeguards to prevent abuse, including bioterrorism. After several workshops and public sessions the group is set to publish a report in summer 2007 outlining options for the field and its researchers.

Heavy stuff.

The Penguin Goes to Redmond

Well, to Redmond Magazine, that is....

Google: Evil Costs Extra

"Don't be evil" is Google's motto. Perhaps they need to amend that to "don't be evil unless it's really profitable" in the light of the following:

The New York Times calls Sicko a “cinematic indictment of the American health care system.” The film is generating significant buzz and is sure to spur a lively conversation about health coverage, care, and quality in America. While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.

The healthcare industry is "money and marketing driven"? Surely not.

But don't worry, cuddly old Google has the solution to this wicked insinuation:

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

Now that's what I call sicko....

Update 1: Feeble attempt to undo some of the damage here. Alas, entropy and nursery rhymes remind us that the egg of integrity, once broken, cannot be put together again.

Update 2: Oooh, look: hypocrisy, too.

Update 3: Google slowly gets it.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: And Another Thing

I interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger twice: once for Rebel Code, soon after IBM announced its support for GNU/Linux - arguably one of the key moments in the corporate acceptance of open source - and once for the Guardian, shortly before he retired from IBM. On both occasions he was a pleasure to talk to.

And now I find another reason to like the chap:

One of my favorite films is the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet.

Me too, me too.

Happy Hacking v3

GPLv3 is out.

EU Gets Open Sourcier

The EU is at it again:

An EU-funded consortium will address one of the perceived barriers for the adoption of open source software and prove once and for all that software which is free and publishes its source code, is capable of outperforming anything else on the market. ‘Flossquality.eu’ is an initiative made up of the three EU research projects: QUALOSS, FLOSSMETRICS and SQO-OSS, demonstrating a strong commitment between partners involved in different projects. The intention is that this initiative will facilitate access to information by disseminating news via a joint RSS feed. ‘Flossquality.eu’ will transform the cooperative way of working between these corresponding projects into hard evidence regarding software quality in an open source.

So there we have it - whatever it is. Still, spending all these Euros on something to do with open source must be a good thing. Probably.

E-vote? Ew-vote

Rather belatedly (sorry, ORG) I got round to reading the Open Rights Group report on the e-voting trials in the UK. It's fantastic stuff - well, the report is, at least: its content is pretty frightening.

This paragraph in the Recommendations said it all, really:

ORG’s position is that e-voting and e-counting provide considerable risks to the integrity of our democracy. The risks presented far outweigh any benefits the systems might potentially offer. In practice the systems have proved to be more expensive, less robust, and considerably slower than manual methods, so any potential benefits are not felt. ORG received some comments which suggest that e-voting and e-counting are inevitable and that to oppose these technologies would be a Luddite view. ORG disagrees, and it is telling that a significant proportion of those concerned about voting technologies are computer scientists and professionals, who are usually enthusiastic adopters of new technology.

What's interesting is not just the damning indictment of e-voting that it offers, but the paradox of "enthusiastic adopters of new technology" who are nonetheless "concerned about voting technologies". I count myself as belonging to this schizophrenic group: it seems clear to me that today's e-voting technologies are simply not reliable enough to entrust our democracy to it.

Interestingly, the central problem is openness, or lack of it: if the entire e-voting process could be made totally open and observable, while preserving confidentiality, many of the most worrying problems would go away.

iPlayer Frothing at the Mouth

I've done my fair share of apoplectic frothing over the disgrace that is the BBC iPlayer, but here's a further helping, courtesy of the Guardian Technology blog.

Plugging in to Asay Power

I met up with Matt Asay (pronounced "ay-see") recently. I learned from this that he's had what amounts to the perfect career in open source business: training as a lawyer (including some work with Larry Lessig), then stints with Lineo (a pioneering embedded Linux company) and Novell (during which time he founded the Open Source Business Conference) before joining Alfresco, an enterprise content management company that is one of a whole new generation of businesses that collectively make up the open source enterprise stack.

My meeting also confirmed something that I had suspected for a while: that he is the most astute commentator on the open source business scene, bar none.

He has a new outlet for these insights in the form of the blog "The Open Road" on C|net (which means, unfortunately, that the URLs are totally opaque), where he is churning out posts at a rate that puts mere professional writers such as myself to shame. To make matters worse, he's come up with a blindingly obvious and brilliant wheeze for both generating lots of interesting copy and also providing what amounts to a grand conspectus of the entire open source business scene: an emailed survey of top CEOs there. Now, why couldn't I have thought of that?

The results are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of free software in the world of business today - and where it's going tomorrow. Here's the list of interviews:

Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource

Javier Soltero, Hyperic

Marten Mickos, MySQL

John Powell, Alfresco

Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol

Boris Kraft, Magnolia

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta

Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra

Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork

Dries Buytaert, Drupal

John Roberts, SugarCRM

Toby Oliver, Path Intelligence

Danny Windham, Digium

Bill Karpovich, Zenoss

Mark Brewer, Covalent

Gianugo Rabellini, Sourcesense

Bob Walter, Untangle

Paul Doscher, JasperSoft

Pete Childers, Zmanda

Rod Johnson, Interface 21

Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies

Eero Teerikorpi, Continuent

In the Middle of the Road...

Two major themes on this blog are free software and virtual worlds. So I'm grateful to Danté Jones for pointing out LA Second Life, which sits neatly at the intersection of the two:

This site is here so that people can see what the Linux Australia members are doing in-world as well as a resource for Linux users interested in Second Life.

As well as those handy resources, the site also flags up news about the Second Life activities of Linux Australia's members, among whom we find Gizzy Electricteeth, whom I had the pleasure of meeting virtually a few months back.

One issue that the site has just raised concerns SL's new voice feature:

Is being mute better than a voice without freedom?

Linux users of Second Life seeing voice currently being supported in all but their Viewer, are posed with that question.

Reading through a job logged in March in the SL JIRA issue tracker titled 'Support Voice on Linux', two things become clear;

1) Linden Lab have licensed Vivox to provide propriety code for Voice.
2) If they ever do support the Linux viewer it will be with a closed 'binary blob'.

Judging by their past actions, I'd say that Linden Lab would love to get this code fully open and cross-platform, but are taking a pragmatic route towards that. Here's what Linden's CTO Cory Ondrejka told me six months ago:

Certainly, there is the question of proprietary code. We may be able to do exactly what we did on the client side, where we are distributing binaries. In six months, when this [move to open up the client] is successful, it may make for very interesting conversations with folks. We can say: Hey, look, you are the leader in this sector, you should open source, here's why we did it and it worked. And I think the fact that there aren't any proof-points of that is maybe part of what scares companies from doing that. I think we're going to be a very interesting test case.

As well as encouraging other software houses to open up, I get the impression that Linden would also be interested in dropping in open source replacements for proprietary code. Time for Linux Australia to get hacking, perhaps.

Eclipse Eclipses Itself

As I wrote over a year ago, Eclipse is really open source's best-kept secret. Today, the best got even better:

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the availability of its annual coordinated project release, this year code named Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year's record-setting release.

The release consists of more than 17 million lines of code and the contributions of over 310 open source developers located in 19 different countries. The 2006 release, code named Callisto, involved 10 project teams, 7 million lines of code, and 260 open-source developers in 12 countries. This is the fourth year in a row the Eclipse community has shipped a major release on schedule.

Innovations in the Europa release include new runtime technology for creating server applications, developer tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), tools for improving team collaboration and support for users of the popular Ruby programming language.

Wow.

BBC's Slap in the Face of Freedom

So the BBC has brought forward its launch of the wretched iPlayer - it wouldn't be that they're trying to pre-empt things, would it?

This is particularly rich:

Jana Bennett, Director of BBC Vision, said: "This is a significant moment, as it heralds a new era when viewers will have the freedom to watch programmes from the BBC's linear TV channels when they want.

Well, no, darling, not actually: freedom is precisely what it does not offer licence-payers such as myself. It offers only chains - kindly provided by Microsoft, ones of whose boys is joining the BBC (now there's a coincidence).

And not content with that slap in the face of freedom, there's this:

Developing a version for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is absolutely on our critical path.

Oh, right, let's make sure every Windows operating system is supported as a priority (don't forget the super-important Windows ME). No point wasting time supporting any of those irrelevant "free" platforms like GNU/Linux now that viewers have the much more important "freedom" to slip on Microsoft's slinky DRM so that they can watch all those groovy "linear TV channels".

Thank goodness for the OSC.