Bleedin' Wonderful Blender

If you ever had any doubts about how amazingly wonderful the open source modelling package Blender was, take a peep at these highly impressive videos - made available as part of Tufts' opencourseware.

Darkness Visible

Yesterday I wrote about Knuth's wise words on software patents. In the course of trying to discover when exactly they were written (anyone know?) I found what seems to be the main source for it - a wonderful page entirely about patents and patent madness.

It only goes up to 2003, but nonetheless has lots of unusual links on the subject that are well worth exploring if, like me, you are a sad individual who finds this stuff both important and fascinating.

Farewell, Then, Lughenjo

We went public with Lughenjo four weeks ago, primarily to test our idea on a wider audience. Since then we have continued our conversations with social entrepreneurs and NGOs and worked on producing a business plan.

The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly that Lughenjo was a good thing for us to do. There were, however, two problems. Firstly it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do. Secondly, and more importantly, it became clear that there was not an immediate demand for a knowledge network from NGOs and social entrepreneurs.

The upshot was that we would have had to force the creation of the network from a demand point of view as well as marketing it to potential donors. This would have put a barrier in the way of us being able to grow the community quickly and therefore monetising it.

Well, anybody worried about "monetising" something deserves to fail in my book. Shame on you Economist, whatever happened to style?

Let the Peoples Sing (Even if No One Listens)

Hey, music industry, I think the people formerly known as the audience are trying to tell you something:

Now in its fourth year, the survey - carried out by Entertainment Media Research in conjunction with media lawyers Olswang - found that 43% of UK consumers admitted to downloading music without paying for it, adding up to a hefty hike from 36% in 2006.

...

Commenting on the slowing growth of authorised downloads (up by just 15 per cent this year, compared to 40 per cent in 2006), Hart said that folks are donning their pirate’s hats and grabbing illegal downloads because official downloads are seen as too pricey.

The survey backs up that claim, with 84 per cent saying that older digital downloads should be made cheaper, while nearly half (48 per cent) said that they’d be happy to pay more for newer releases.

John Enser, Oslang’s head honcho of music, added: “The music industry needs to embrace new opportunities being generated by the increasing popularity of music on social networking sites. Surfing these sites and discovering new music is widespread with the latest generation of online consumers but the process of actually purchasing the music needs to be made easier to encourage sales and develop this new market.”

Patron Saint of Computing Against Software Patents

If computing has a patron saint, it is the great and amazing Donald Knuth. Put another way, he is the god of computer algorithms, so I was particularly pleased to come across this definitive statement on their patentability:

In the period 1945-1980, it was generally believed that patent law did not pertain to software. However, it now a ppears that some people have received patents for algorithms of practical importance--e.g., Lempel-Ziv compression and RSA public key encryption--and are now legally preventing other programmers from using these algorithms.

This is a serious change from the previous policy under which the computer revolution became possible, and I fear this change will be harmful for society. It certainly would have had a profoundly negative effect on my own work: For example, I developed software called TeX that is now used to produce more than 90% of all books and journals in mathematics and physics and to produce hundreds of thousands of technical reports in all scientific disciplines. If software patents had been commonplace in 1980, I would not have been able to create such a system, nor would I probably have ever thought of doing it, nor can I imagine anyone else doing so.

I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.

Nor is it possible to distinguish between "numerical" and "nonnumerical" algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.

Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19thcentury attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It's like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.

Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented. Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed. The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts. Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words. Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products.

Amen to that. (Via Coding Horror.)

Spreading the Intellectual Monopoly Madness

How mad is this?

Advanced European countries are increasingly looking for channels to school their neighbours and worldwide free-trade agreement partners on the enforcement of western-style intellectual property rights.

And how bad is the premise:

The basic underlying assumption of the meeting was that a stronger intellectual property system is beneficial, and that UNECE members have knowledge and ideas to patent and protect. A source characterised the view as: A well-designed intellectual property regime increases national wealth and benefits consumers by stimulating research and investment into new technologies and innovative products, and by enabling the transfer of technology, including between countries at different stages of economic development.

Well, no, actually. As history shows, intellectual monopolies do nothing to increase national wealth overall: they just make the holders of the monopolies richer. Society as a whole loses out. Spreading this kind of misinformation is downright immoral.

They Play iPlayer Content - Without the DRM

This is why it is utterly pointless for the BBC to go to all the trouble of wrapping DRM around its content - note, *its* content, not other people's - and inconveniencing most of the online world in the process:

we're hearing that FairUse4WM strips the files of their DRM -- anyone try it out yet?

And the answer is....

Thunderbird Is Not Go

Here's a worrying development over in the Mozilla community:

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus - delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services - is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We're not yet sure what this organization will look like. We've thought about a few different options. I've described them below. If you've got a different idea please let us know.

What's worrying about this is that it seems to demonstrate a tunnel vision, where Firefox (and making money from it) are foregrounded above everything else. The fact is, email is a critical application, even if more and more people use Web-based mail (as I do - but I still use Thunderbird too). Moreover, Mozilla is a foundation, and that implies looking at the bigger picture, not concentrating - as a company might - on the success of its main "product".

The open source world needs Thunderbird - indeed, the wider software community needs it. Although I accept that it lacks the community that Firefox has generated, that is not a reason to jettison it, and hope for the best. On the contrary: the very difficulties that Thunderbird has in firing up a community and in moving forward are precisely why the Mozilla Foundation should keep it under its wing.

Mind Your Own BusinessWeek

Extraordinary column in BusinessWeek:

While Microsoft leads in India and China, Linux is mounting a strong challenge in both nations. The Linux community has signed a deal with Beijing to make Linux the default operating system for computers used by the Chinese government and many parts of the Chinese educational system. In India, the prices of Windows and Office are so high that Linux is the only practical, affordable choice for most of the population.

In this context, applying Western IP enforcement policies to stem the flood of illegal copies of Windows in China and India risks winning the battle (to deter and punish IP infringement) while losing the war (to become the dominant standard operating system on the desktop). As long as Linux remains a serious rival in China and India, Microsoft should welcome pirated copies of its software. Illegal versions of Windows are free, which helps Microsoft offset the initial cost advantage of "free" open-source software.

Every pirated copy installed on a Chinese or Indian computer brings one more person into the Microsoft ecosystem. This strengthens Microsoft's market for third-party developers of applications, tools, and other complementary products. Equally important, it denies Linux that next new customer who would strengthen the open-source ecosystem against Windows.

Maybe it's to be expected that arch-capitalist tool BusinessWeek would be offering free advice to Microsoft on how to crush that commie open source stuff. What I find harder to comprehend is the fact that the author of this piece is a self-styled "authority on open innovation, open business models, and more open approaches to intellectual property management" - all with a view to stamping it out, apparently.

Opening Up Advertising

As the post below indicates, one reason that open content strategies are working is that online advertising is increasingly profitable (just ask Google). Further proof that advertising is evolving rapidly is the rise of OpenAds, one of open source's better-kept secrets. Here's a piece by Matt Asay with some useful background:

OpenAds is one of the most interesting open source projects/companies on the planet. Period. It's an open source ad server. Like Doubleclick without the lock-in or fees. In other words, open source. 100% GPLv2. I guess it should be no surprise that the world's most popular ad server, powering Web 2.0 business models, is open source, just as the LAMP stack is the technological basis for Web 2.0 sites/services.

Amazingly, OpenAds is British, too.

The Value of Free Content

One of the constant themes of this blog is that there's plenty of money to be made by giving away things for free. Here's an interesting study by Neil Thurman of the UK newspapers sector that confirms precisely that:

Advertising is relevant to the issue of content charging because, to a certain extent, there is a trade-off between them. Content charging, by limiting access, reduces the number of users to whom a page is exposed. When FT.com introduced a subscription barrier to parts of its content in May 2002, user numbers fell dramatically, as did its advertising revenue (Ó hAnluain, 2004). Conversely, when Times Online removed the subscription barrier it had imposed on overseas users, it experienced a “huge” increase in traffic (Bale, 2006).

Users are put off by having to pay, but traffic is also affected for technological reasons. Content charging can alienate sites from search engines and aggregators like Google (Outing, 2005). Similarly, imposing a subscription barrier also isolates newspaper websites like the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com from blogs, a growing source of traffic (Penenberg, 2005). In the current market, many newspapers feel that the revenue they could gain from content charging would be less than what they would lose in advertising. Even the UK newspapers who are currently charging for significant amounts of content — FT.com, Independent.co.uk, and Scotsman.com—can see the potential benefits of dropping these barriers

A companion study indicates that opening up can bring with it some unexpected benefits:

Some British news websites are attracting larger audiences than their American competitors in US regional and national markets. At the British news websites studied, Americans made up an average of 36 per cent of the total audience with up to another 39 per cent of readers from countries other than the US. Visibility on portals like the Drudge Report and on indexes such as Google News brings considerable international traffic but is partly dependent on particular genres of story and fast publication times.

Opening up means that users get to decide whether to read you, and that quality often wins out. Newspapers with closed content are unlikely to attract this kind of passing trade, and will therefore lose global influence as well as advertising revenue. (Via Antony Mayfield.)

OpenBSD Foundation

Bring on the opens: here's a new foundation to support OpenBSD, the Cinderella of the open world, and a few other worthy projects:

The OpenBSD Foundation is a Canadian not-for-profit corporation which exists to support OpenBSD and related projects such as OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and OpenCVS. While the foundation works in close cooperation with the developers of these wonderful free software projects, it is a separate entity.

Formally, the corporation's objects are to support and further the development, advancement, and maintenance of free software based on the OpenBSD operating system, including the operating system itself and related free software projects.

(Via Slashdot.)

Open Source Space Exploration

We all know that the ideas behind open source are out of this world, and now here's the proof:

Space enthusiast and engineer Paul Wooster wants to open the source code for outer space, because, he says, it should be easier for everyone who wants to contribute to human activities in space to do so, not just people with advanced degrees in rocketry. To that end, Wooster has established DevelopSpace, a community based on open source philosophies, designed to attract anyone interested in sharing their skills in order to make more space exploration possible.

...

"We're focused on building up the technical foundations of human activities in space, identifying the current barriers to those activities, and then coming up with engineered solutions to those barriers -- but doing so in an open source manner. If, for example, I design a solar-powered system for use on Mars and do some testing in the lab, rather than just writing up a paper and publishing it in a journal or a .PDF format where it's difficult to extract information, I would post all of the CAD files and the more detailed engineering analyses so someone else can come along and improve on my design -- they don't have to start from scratch. Over time, what will happen is that more and more people will get involved in these actitivies and we will make technical progress toward lowering the barriers to entry for someone who wants to set up a human base on Mars, or an orbiting outpost. I don't actually see the group in the near term doing those types of things. This is much more of laying the foundations."

(With thanks to James Tyrrell.)

Another One Bites the Dust - Nicely

Here's double good news:

SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the most widely used free and open source (FOSS) license in the market.

Double because it sees yet another major open source enterprise stack company adopt the GNU GPL, and because it's gone straight to version 3, with no ifs and buts, which will only strengthen that licence's position. Interesting, too, Eben Moglen's quoted comments:

"We believe that sharing knowledge is good. We encourage other important free and open source software projects to take this step and join us in making better software."

cc Learn

One of the most compelling applications of open content is in the educational sphere. After all, it's crazy for teachers to keep on creating the same content again and again: the whole idea of knowledge is to build on what has been learned. So it's good to see the Creative Commons setting up a new arm aimed specifically at promoting the re-use of materials here. It's called ccLearn: at the moment, there's not much to see there apart from the Open Education Search project, but I'm sure that things will grow quickly - the logic is compelling.

Truth Will Out

I was pleased to see that the story about Prince giving away CDs in various ways, and making money from live performances, is starting to get picked up by more news outlets. Obviously, when people are presented with a real-life alternative to making money from CDs, things become a little clearer.

But I was disappointed to come across this story about the Los Angeles Times killing a feature by Patrick Goldstein, one of its own reporters, that suggested it follow suit:

His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed, apparently by associate editor John Montorio. Goldstein's offense was to propose that the Times follow the lead of the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday (which distributed 2.9 million free Prince CDs) and partner with older artists to give away music in the paper. He argued it could help make the Times website a destination for fans and reduce the need for front page ads (which the editor of the Times himself calls a huge mistake.)

This was doubly stupid. First, it's a great piece. Here's the conclusion:

Giving music away doesn’t mean it has lost its value, just that its value is no longer moored to the price of a CD. Like it or not, the CD is dying, as is the culture of newsprint. People want their music — and their news — in new ways. It’s time we embraced change instead of always worrying if some brash new idea — like giving away music — would tarnish our sober minded image. When businesses are faced with radical change, they are usually forced to ask — is it a threat or an opportunity? Guess which choice is the right answer.

Spot on.

But spiking this piece was also stupid because it was bound to get out - both the piece and story about its spiking - and people like me were bound to spread the news. Thanks to this new-fangled Internet thing, truth will out - eventually. (via TechDirect.)

Update: And as further proof that you can't just bury this stuff, here's a New York Times piece about the incident.

When Eben Met Tim

I've always felt rather ambivalent about Tim O'Reilly. On the one hand, he is undoubtedly a very shrewd reader of markets, and has undoubtedly contributed hugely to the rise of the open source movement. On the other, he always seems to take what might be called an extreme pragmatist position, where questions of making plenty of dosh always seem to be lurking in the background (and sometimes in the foreground).

I'm glad to see it's not only me:

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.

So it's really a matter of whether your on Eben's side, or Tim's side....

The End of the Copyright Ratchet/Racket?

Will this response from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport go down in history as the great turning point for copyright, when the constant extension ratchet was halted and eventually reversed?

Maybe I'm an incurably optimist, but I have to say I was pretty impressed by the generally sane tone of this document after years of industry-driven exaggeration about "piracy" and such-like. The best demonstration of this comes right at the end, where the earlier proposal by the House of Commons Culture Committee to extend the term of copyright in sound recordings is discussed. Here's what the report has to say:

The Government appreciates the work of the Committee and the deliberation it has given to this subject. As the Committee noted,the independent Gowers Review also considered this issue in detail and recommended that the European Commission retain a term of protection for sound recordings and performers of 50 years. The Review undertook a detailed analysis of all the arguments put forward,including the moral arguments regarding the treatment of performers. It concluded that an extension would not benefit the majority of performers,most of whom have contractual relationships requiring their royalties be paid back to the record label. It also concluded that an extension would have a negative impact on the balance of trade and that it would not increase incentives to create new works.Furthermore,it considered not just the impact on the music industry but on the economy as a whole,and concluded that an extension would lead to increased costs to industry,such as those who use music – whether to provide ambience in a shop or restaurant or for TV or radio broadcasting – and to consumers who would have to pay royalties for longer. In reaching such conclusions,the Review took account of the question of parity with other countries such as the US,and concluded that,although royalties were payable for longer there,the total amount was likely to be similar – or possibly less – as there were fewer revenue streams available under the US system.

This is doubly important, because it will have important knock-on effects beyond the UK. As Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Groups rightly points out:

This is significant, since the UK government is likely to have a disproportionately loud voice on this issue both because it is home to the most lucrative recording industry in Europe and because it has taken the time to review this issue in detail.

So we have the prospect of Europe following the UK's lead in halting the constant copyright extension. This, in its turn, will help to put a brake on such copyright extensions around the world, since there will no longer be the argument that "eveyone else is doing it, we must follow suit". Maybe it's too much to hope that in due course copyright terms will start to be reduced - but then, as I said, I'm an incurable optimist.

Open Source Food

Programs are sets of instructions - rather like recipes. So if you can have open source code, why not open source food:

Open Source Food came to fruition because me and my father wanted to create a place for people like us. We’re not professional cooks, we just love food. We want to share, learn and improve ourselves with the help of like-minded food lovers. Open Source Food is a platform for that.

Truly right-on, not only does it adopt CC licences for the content, it warns:

Please be aware that in legal terms, recipes count as a method or technique and therefore cannot technically be copyrighted.

Mind you, that hasn't stopped some sad individuals from trying. (Via eHub.)

Alfresco: Open Source Barometer

The enterprise content management company Alfesco has cropped up a few times on these pages. It's increasingly clear to me that it is one of the leaders of the second-generation open source companies that are starting to make their mark in the wider world of business software - not least because it employs the one-man open source powerhouse that is Matt Asay.

A further sign of Alfresco's importance in this sector is the appearance of its Open Source Barometer:

The Alfresco open source barometer is a survey, conducted April through June 2007, using opt-in data provided by 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members with the aim of providing a global survey of trends in the use of open source software in the enterprise.

Users were asked about their preferences in operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals to capture the latest information in how companies today evaluate and deploy open source and legacy proprietary software stacks in the enterprise.

The report is valuable, because it's based on a serious, if necessarily skewed, sample size. Two results stand out: that people increasingly are developing on Windows, and then deploying on GNU/Linux (something I'd noticed too), and that the UK lags behinds other countries as far as Alfresco's products are concerned:

The survey found that the U.S. is leading open source adoption globally. We believe the Global 2000 is seeking innovation and better value for their technology investments whereas in Europe open source adoption is often driven by governments seeking better value for their citizens. The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Apparently the survey will appear every six months, which is good news: tracking changes in its results should prove fascinating.

Not-So-Rough Trade

As I and a few other enlightened individuals have been banging on about for some time, allowing digital files to be copied is not the end of business - just of business as usual. Essentially, people selling physical things - like books or CDs - need to recognise the differences from digital ones, and build on them positively.

Here's a good example:

At a time when CD price wars and music downloads are putting entire High Street chains at risk, independent retailers Rough Trade are opening what they say is the country's biggest music-only specialist store.

...

Despite the company's niche reputation, he feels it can fulfil what he sees as the "enormous demand" for a shop that offers expertise and can recommend music with authority - and he doesn't think downloads are killing the CD.

"With this store, we feel there's a dormant music shopper out there who's not buying music from the High Street simply because they don't like High Street retailers, not because they've gone off physical formats," he says.

"If anything, the people I talk to appreciate vinyl and CDs more than ever in this digital age. It's just that they've gone off the way it's sold.

Exactly. Shops are about the experience of shopping, not just of buying. Similarly, CDs and other analogue obejcts are about the experience of having and holding such objects, not just what they contain. As the new Rough Trade shop shows, some people are beginning to get this. (Via TechDirt.)

Open Bebo: Boss Still Doesn't Get It

Well, it had to happen:

Social networking site Bebo is likely to follow Facebook's lead and open up its site to developers to create applications that work within the site.

Mind you, the following comment is so wide of the mark, that it makes you wonder whether Michael Birch, Bebo's chief executive, really understands why he's opening up, and what it really means:

"Obviously in social networks there's this conflicting thing of control, of being a closed network and us making all the money, and then opening up to the greater good of the social network.

No, no, no: opening up is how you make even more money, you twit. (Via Antony Mayfield).

Good or Evil, Google At Least Does Openness

Although much of the shine has worn off the Google halo, there's no denying that, regardless or whether its acting purely from altruistic motives (probably not), it certainly gets the benefits of openness:

Google announced today that should the Federal Communications Commission adopt a framework requiring greater competition and consumer choice, Google intends to participate in the federal government’s upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.

In a filing with the FCC on July 9, Google urged the Commission to adopt rules for the auction that ensure that, regardless of who wins the spectrum at auction, consumers' interests are served. Specifically, Google encouraged the FCC to require the adoption of four types of "open" platforms as part of the license conditions:

* Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
* Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
* Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
* Open networks: Third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee's wireless network.

Today, as a sign of Google’s commitment to promoting greater innovation and choices for consumers, CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, stating that should the FCC adopt all four license conditions requested above, Google intends to commit a minimum of $4.6 billion to bidding in the upcoming 700 MHz auction.

This could get interesting.

Open Source Self-Governance

A little while back I wrote about the idea of using wikis for open government. Peter Suber - about whom Bill Hooker commented recently "not a sparrow falls in the OA world but PS knows about it!" - emailed me with some interesting news about an earlier project of his called Nomic:

Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It's a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves. The Initial Set of rules, some commentary by me, and some reflections by Douglas Hofstadter, were published in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in Scientific American in June of 1982. It was quickly translated into many European and Asian languages. Games were regularly played, and kicked off, the ARPANET, the Defense Department network which sired the Internet. Nomic has been used to stimulate artistic creativity, simulate the circulation of money, structure group therapy sessions, train managers, and to teach public speaking, legal reasoning, and legislative drafting. Nomic games have sent ambassadors to other Nomic games, formed federations, and played Meta-Nomic. Nomic games have experienced revolution, oppressive coups, and the restoration of popular sovereignty. Above all, Nomic has been fun for thousands of players around the world. For me, it was intended to illustrate and embody the thesis of my book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, that a legal "rule of change" such as a constitutional amendment clause may apply to itself and authorize its own amendment. (Nomic is the third appendix of the book.)

The connection with open governance is clear. Peter passed on the news that people are trying to apply a Nomic-based approach to open source:

Just last week, by chance, a total stranger proposed a Nomic-variant as a serious system of "Open-Source Self-Governance" (his words).

Here's what that site has to say about the project, which is called Efficasync:

Efficasync is a method of open-source self-governance, where all the members of a group have the ability to examine, discuss and modify their group’s set of operational goals, reasonings, constraints, procedures and arrangements. In computer lingo, each member of such a group has both ‘read’ and ‘write(2)’ permissions to this set of governing statements. As demonstrated by the previous two lines, this document occasionally recasts a few traditional views of governance into a computer programmer’s frame of reference. The programmer’s paradigm holds a new, and potentially valuable, perspective for democratic governance. This document’s purpose is to describe a specific way, based on this new perspective, that a directly-democratic group’s governing infrastructure could be arranged. In doing this, the three main components which constitute Efficasync are explained: a Nomic, a particular graphical interface, and a starting set of ‘rules.’ This document was written with the intention of presenting a prototype for emulation and extension by groups wishing to operate as open-source selfgoverning entities.

Fascinating stuff.

In Your Face

Has everyone gone Facebook mad? It certainly seems so, and apparently I'm not the only one to think so. But whatever your views of Facebook now, it looks increasingly likely that it's going to be very big.

As I mentioned recently, the first sign that it had aspirations to being more than just another social network was when it opened up its platform. Now, it has underlined the platform aspect by purchasing Parakey.

Who? you might well say. Well, this might give you a hint of why it's an interesting move:

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Interested? You should be.

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.”

"Live their lives online": well, that explains why Facebook bought the outfit. Among other things, Parakey will let Facebook users twiddle endlessly with their profiles even when they're offline.

Oh, and that "Ross" is Blake Ross, one of the moving forces behind Firefox. Parakey is based on Firefox technology, and will be (partly) open source. Assuming that Facebook keeps those parts open source (and it's hard to see how it could avoid doing so without rewriting the code from scratch), that means that Facebook could well become something of an ally for free software.

Well, I suppose that's a good reason to join the Facebook stampede.