Firefox....for Cubs

There's a new Firefox support site around that's aimed at absolute beginners. Smart move, now that Firefox is beginning to bleed beyond the world of geeks and their immediate family.... (Via Linux.com.)

The (Female) RMS of Tibet?

As a big fan of both freedom and Tibet, it seems only right that I should point to the Students for a Free Tibet site. Against a background of increasing repression and cultural genocide by the Chinese authorities in Tibet, it will be interesting to see what happens during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics and the games themselves. On the one hand, China would clearly love to portray itself as one big happy multi-ethnic family; on the other, it is unlikely to brook public reminders about its shameful invasion and occupation of Tibet.

I can only admire those Tibetans who speak up about this, and even daring to challenge, publicly, the Chinese authorities, even within China itself. One of the highest-profile - and hence most courageous - of these is Lhadon Tethong:

A Tibetan woman born and raised in Canada, Lhadon Tethong has traveled the world, working to build a powerful youth movement for Tibetan independence. She has spoken to countless groups about the situation in Tibet, most notably to a crowd of 66,000 at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C. She first became involved with Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) in 1996, when she founded a chapter at University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then, Lhadon has been a leading force in many strategic campaigns, including the unprecedented victory against China’s World Bank project in 2000.

Lhadon is a frequent spokesperson for the Tibetan independence movement, and serves as co-chair of the Olympics Campaign Working Group of the International Tibet Support Network. She has worked for SFT since March 1999 and currently serves as the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet International.

She has a blog, called Beijing Wide Open, stuffed full of Tibetan Web 2.0 goodness. I'm sure RMS would approve. (Via Boing Boing.)

Update: Sigh: bad news already....

On the Necessity of Open Access and Open Data

One of the great things about open source is its transparency: you can't easily hide viruses or trojans, nor can you simply filch code from other people, as you can with closed source. Indeed, the accusations made from time to time that open source contains "stolen" code from other programs is deeply ironic, since it's almost certainly proprietary, closed software that has bits of thievery hidden deep within its digital bowels.

The same is true of open access and open data: when everything is out in the open, it is much easier to detect plagiarism or outright fraud. Equally, making it hard for people to access online, searchable text, or the underlying data by placing restrictions on its distribution reduces the number of people checking it and hence the likelihood that anyone will notice if something is amiss.

A nicely-researched piece on Ars Technica provides a clear demonstration of this:

Despite the danger represented by research fraud, instances of manufactured data and other unethical behavior have produced a steady stream of scandal and retractions within the scientific community. This point has been driven home by the recent retraction of a paper published in the journal Science and the recognition of a few individuals engaged in dozens of acts of plagiarism in physics journals.

By contrast, in the case of arXiv's preprint holdings, catching this stuff is relatively easy thanks to its open, online nature:

Computer algorithms to detect duplications of text have already proven successful at detecting plagiarism in papers in the physical sciences. The arXiv now uses similar software to scan all submissions for signs of plagiarized text. As this report was being prepared, the publishing service Crossref announced that it would begin a pilot program to index the contents of the journals produced by a number of academic publishers in order to expose them for the verification of originality. Thus, catching plagiarism early should be getting increasingly easy for the academic world.

Note, though, that open access allows *anyone* to check for plagiarism, not just the "authorised" keepers of the copyrighted academic flame.

Similarly, open data means anyone can take a peek, poke around and pick out problems:

How did Dr. Deb manage to create the impression that he had generated a solid data set? Roberts suggests that a number of factors were at play. Several aspects of the experiments allowed Deb to work largely alone. The mouse facility was in a separate building, and "catching a mouse embryo at the three-cell stage had him in from midnight until dawn," Dr. Roberts noted. Deb was also on his second post-doc position, a time where it was essential for him to develop the ability to work independently. The nature of the data itself lent it to manipulation. The raw data for these experiments consisted of a number of independent grayscale images that are normally assigned colors and merged (typically in Photoshop) prior to analysis.

Again, if the "raw data" were available to all, as good open notebook science dictates that they should be, any manipulation could be detected more readily.

Interestingly, this is not something that traditional "closed source" publishing can ever match using half-hearted fudges or temporary fixes, just as closed source programs can never match open ones for transparency. There is simply no substitute for openness.

OpenProj

For many years, the only decent free end-user app was GIMP, and the history of open source on the desktop has been one of gradually filling major holes - office suite, browser, email etc. - to bring it up to the level of proprietary offerings.

Happily, things have moved on, and it's now possible to use free software for practically any desktop activity. One major lack has been project planning, traditionally the (expensive) realm of Microsoft Project. No longer it seems. With the launch of OpenProj, the open source world now has a free alternative, for a variety of platforms.

It's still too early to say how capable the program is, but it's certainly a welcome addition. The only other concern is the licence, which seems not to have been chosen yet, although an OSI-approved variant is promised.

Update: Apparently, if I'd taken the trouble to install it, I would have seen that the licence is the Common Public Attribution Licence. (Thanks to Randy Metcalfe.)

Patent Joke of the Month

It is, of course, hard to choose from the rather crowded field of contenders, but this one certainly takes the biscuit:

An Information and Application Distribution System (IADS) is disclosed. The IADS operates, in one embodiment, to distribute, initiate and allow interaction and communication within like-minded communities. Application distribution occurs through the transmission and receipt of an "invitation application" which contains both a message component and an executable component to enable multiple users to connect within a specific community. The application object includes functionality which allows the user's local computer to automatically set up a user interface to connect with a central controller which facilitates interaction and introduction between and among users.

A system to create an online community - including, of course, that brilliant stroke of utterly unique genius, the "invitation application": why couldn't I have thought of that? (Via TechCrunch.)

Mr. Dell Does the Decent Thing

Hooray:

today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron E1505N notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed.

(Via The Open Sourcerer.)

In Denial

This is an important story - not so much for what it says, but for the fact that it is being said by a major US title like Newsweek:

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Even though the feature has little that's new, the detail in which it reports the cynical efforts of powerful industries to stymie attempts to mitigate the damage that climate change will cause is truly sickening. It is cold (sic) comfort that the people behind this intellectual travesty will rightly be judged extremely harshly by future generations - assuming we're lucky enough to have a future. (Via Open the Future.)

Why ICANN Is Evil, Part 58697

I've been tracking the goings-on at ICANN, which oversees domain names and many other crucial aspects of the Internet, for many years now, and I've yet to see anything good come out of the organisation. Here's someone else who has problems with them:

In this Article, I challenge the prevailing idea that ICANN's governance of the Internet's infrastructure does not threaten free speech and that ICANN's governance of the Internet therefore need not embody special protections for free speech. I argue that ICANN's authority over the Internet's infrastructure empowers it to enact regulations affecting speech within the most powerful forum for expression ever developed. ICANN cannot remain true to the democratic norms it was designed to embody unless it adopts policies to protect freedom of expression. While ICANN's recent self-evaluation and proposed reforms are intended to ensure compliance with its obligations under its governance agreement, these proposed reforms will render it less able to embody the norms of liberal democracy and less capable of protecting individuals' fundamental rights. Unless ICANN reforms its governance structure to render it consistent with the procedural and substantive norms of democracy articulated herein, ICANN should be stripped of its decision-making authority over the Internet's infrastructure.

Strip, strip, strip. (Via IGP blog.)

Lenovo Today, Tomorrow the World

A small step, but one of an increasing number towards wider availability of open source on the desktop/laptop:

Lenovo and Novell today announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux* on Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system. The companies will offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell to commercial customers on Lenovo notebooks including those in the popular ThinkPad T Series, a class of notebooks aimed at typical business users, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007. The ThinkPad notebooks with the Linux-preload will also be available for purchase by individual customers.

Live CD + Open Content = LiveContent

And about time too:

LiveContent is an umbrella idea which aims to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities. LiveContent works to identify creators and content providers working to share their creations more easily with others. LiveContent works to support developers and others who build better technology to distribute these works. LiveContent is up-to-the-minute creativity, "alive" by being licensed Creative Commons, which allows others to better interact with the content.

LiveContent can be delivered in a variety of ways. The first incarnation of LiveContent will deliver content as a LiveCD. LiveCDs are equivalent to what is called a LiveDistro. LiveCDs have traditionally been a vehicle to test an operating system or applications live. Operating systems and/or applications are directly booted from a CD or other type of media without needing to install the actual software on a machine. LiveContent aims to add value to LiveDistros by providing dynamically-generated content within the distribution.

Let's hope this catches on - we need more synergy in the world of openness.

Why Microsoft is Going Open Source

All is explained here (well, not all, but a bit.)

Of the People, By the People, For the People

I'm rather slow in this one, but it's such a good example of how everyone gains from public collaboration - including Google, whose CTO of Google Earth, Michael Jones, is speaking here:

This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places... there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.

Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.

This is the future, people - your future (though I do wonder about the map data copyright in these situations).

Oooh-Er OA

This sounds slightly worrying:

After careful consideration, the Cushing/Whitney Medical and Kline Science Libraries have decided to end their support for BioMed Central's Open Access publishing effort. The libraries previously covered 100% of the author page charges which allowed these papers to be made freely available worldwide via the Internet at time of publication. This experiment in Open Access publishing has proved unsustainable. The libraries' support will continue for all Yale-authored articles currently in submission to BioMed Central as of July 27, 2007.

The libraries’ BioMedCentral membership represented an opportunity to test the technical feasibility and the business model of this OA publisher. While the technology proved acceptable, the business model failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options. Instead, BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central page charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of page charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The page charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional page charges in submission.

Eeek: I wonder what the backstory to all this is?

Update 1: Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central, has put together a reply to Yale's points. But I can't help feeling that this one will run for a while yet.

Update 2: And here's the full analysis I should have done.

Wiki Wiki Sun

Wikis were born under the Hawaiian sun (well, the name was), so perhaps it's appropriate that Sun should have set up its own wikis, in a further sign that Sun gets it, and that wikis are almost mainstream now. (Via Simon Phipps.)

Parallel Universes?

Now, where have I heard this before?

Free and open source software (FOSS) has roots in the ideals of academic freedom and the unimpeded exchange of information. In the last five years, the concepts have come full circle, with FOSS serving as a model for Open Access (OA), a movement within academia to promote unrestricted access to scholarly material for both researchers and the general public.

"The philosophy is so similar that when we saw the success that open source was having, it served as a guiding light to us," says Melissa Hagemann, program manager for Open Access initiatives at the Open Society Institute, a private foundation for promoting democratic and accessible reform at all levels of society. Not only the philosophy, but also the history, the need to generate new business models, the potential empowerment of users, the impact on developing nations, and resistance to the movement make OA a near twin of FOSS.

Oh, I remember:

The parallels between this movement - what has come to be known as “open access” – and open source are striking. For both, the ultimate wellspring is the Internet, and the new economics of sharing that it enabled. Just as the early code for the Internet was a kind of proto-open source, so the early documentation – the RFCs – offered an example of proto-open access. And for both their practitioners, it is recognition – not recompense – that drives them to participate.

Great minds obviously think alike - and Bruce does have some nice new quotations. Read both; contrast and compare.

Sword Patents

Nice:

MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these.

On the Open Road

One of the criticisms commonly levelled at free content is that it cannibalises existing paid-for content in a way that is economically unsustainable. So it's good to see this kind of development as a counter-example:

The founders of Wikitravel (www.wikitravel.org), the Webby Award-winning online travel guide, today announced the launch of Wikitravel Press (www.wikitravelpress.com), a company for publishing Wikitravel content in book form.

Wikitravel uses the wiki-based collaborative editing technology made popular by Wikipedia. Wikitravel guides are built on the principle that travelers often get their best information from other travelers. The website offers over 30,000 travel guides in seventeen languages, with over 10,000 editorial contributions per week. Wikitravel won the Best Travel Website category in the 2007 Webby Awards.

Wikitravel Press builds upon this extraordinary community participation to create continually updated, reliable guidebooks, combined, abridged or changed by paid editors, published on demand and shipped anywhere in the world. Wikitravel Press will hire book editors to assemble relevant destination guides, abridge or expand them, and do final copy-editing and fact-checking.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

Open TTT and Openness

One of the central themes of this blog is that the ideas behind free software can be applied much more widely - indeed, that open source is really just the beginning of something much bigger. I've written about many of the experiments in applying open source ideas outside software, but there are now so many of them that it's hard keeping up.

So I was particularly pleased to find out about this extensive listing of such activities, put together by the Open TTT consortium, itself an interesting project in openness:

OPEN TTT is a EU-funded project (SSA-030595 INN7) that aims at bridging the separate worlds of technology transfer and open source software (OSS), by introducing novel methodologies for helping companies in the take up of technology and innovation and leveraging the peculiarities of the open access model. The approach is based on the creation of mini-clusters, interest-driven group of SMEs and the matching of suitable open source software adapted to the cluster needs. The project covers four thematic areas: Logistic & Transport, Industrial production, Energy & environment and Public Administrations. On these areas, suitable open source software will be examined and assessed, and a mediation will be created between companies interested in its use and software developers or commercial entities that provide suitable support.

Corrections and additions are welcome, apparently. (Via Carlo Daffara).

Pamela Samuelson on Copyright Reform

Here's a useful voice to have in the debate about copyright reform, Pamela Samuelson:

The Copyright Act of 1976 is far too long, complex, and largely incomprehensible to non-copyright professionals. It is also the work product of pre-computer technology era. This law also lacks normative heft. That is, it does not embody a clear vision about what its normative purposes are.

This article offers the author's preliminary thoughts about why copyright reform is needed, why it will be difficult to undertake, and why notwithstanding these difficulties, it may nonetheless be worth doing. It offers suggestions about how one might go about trimming the statute to a more managemable length, articulating more simply its core normative purposes, and spinning certain situation-specific provisions off into a rulemaking process.

Thirty years after enactment of the '76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm.

Pity she's so defeatist:

The prospects of copyright reform are perhaps so dim that a reasonable person might well think it a fool’s errand to contemplate a reform project of any sort. It is, however, worth considering whether it would be a valuable project to draft a model copyright law, along the lines of model law projects that the American Law Institute as frequently promulgated, with interpretive comments and citations to relevant caselaw, or a set of copyright principles that would provide a shorter, simpler, more comprehensible, and more normatively appealing framework for copyright law.

Call me an incurable optimist, but I think we might aim a little higher....

Rock On, Amarok

Interesting:

Magnatune, a record label that uses a CC BY-NC-SA license for all releases (Magnatune founder John Buckman is also on the CC board), has just hired free software developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen to work on Amarok, a free software media player.

While software and services companies for years have hired many free software developers to continue to work on their free software projects and employees of open content companies have contributed to free software projects, this may be the first time an open content company has hired a free software developer to work on the developer’s free software project.

I suspect this will be the first of many such hires. Open content companies are growing and often are highly dependent on free software for infrastructure and end user services.

I agree: as open content becomes more of an economic force we can expect the synergy between it and open source to become more explicit.

Google's Choice of Hercules

Further to yesterday's post about a call to respect free use of copyrighted material, here's an interesting point about Google's participation:

it certainly seems ironic that Google is being associated with this complaint, at the same time as they are putting putting highly misleading notices on scanned public domain works:

The Google notice, found as page 1 on downloadable PDFs of public domain works available via Google Book Search, "asks" users to:

Make non-commercial use of the files. We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes...

Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

There is clear U.S. precedent that scanning a public domain work does not create a new copyright so there seems to be absolutely zero legal basis for restricting use or forcing users to preserve inserted per-page watermarks-cum-advertisements.

So, which side are you on, Google? (Via Michael Hart.)

Playing Fair with Fair Use

A straw in the digital wind?

Today, the Computer and Communications Industry Association -- a group representing companies including Google Inc., Microsoft Inc. and other technology heavyweights -- plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that several content companies, ranging from sports leagues to movie studios to book publishers, are overstepping bounds with their warnings. The group wants the FTC to investigate and order copyright holders to stop wording warnings in what it sees as a misrepresentative way.

A sign, at least, that people/companies are becoming more aware of fair rights issues:

Justin Hughes, a professor of law at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, said the notion of fair use is expanding in the digital age, with consumers getting used to copying CDs, for example, as a gift for somebody. A difficulty with the concept of fair use is that while the Copyright Act establishes what fair use is, the application of the rules is still somewhat subjective, said Mr. Hughes. They call for courts to consider several factors ranging from the nature of the use -- such as whether it is public or private -- to whether the reproduced work had any effect on the market for the original.

Such questions are cropping up more in the context of the Internet. For example, Google is arguing its project to digitize the world's books and make snippets of them available on demand falls under fair use; the Authors Guild and a number of major publishers disagree and are suing the search engine. By contrast, most scholars agree that posting a straight clip of a television show, as some YouTube users do, doesn't fall under fair use. YouTube, which Google bought last year for more than $1.7 billion, quickly removes them once copyright holders complain.

PLoS ONE is (the) One

PLoS ONE celebrates its first anniversary:

The initial success of PLoS ONE is something unprecedented in scientific publishing. It has been achieved because of the commitment and faith of hundreds of people: PLoS staff, editorial and advisory board members, reviewers, authors and particularly readers. And yet this is only a very small step towards an open, interactive and efficient literature that will accelerate scientific progress. Over the coming months, we will take further steps with additional functionality on the site, new publishing ventures launching and established ones taking more advantage of the opportunities afforded by the TOPAZ platform on which PLoS ONE is presented.

PLoS ONE is undoubtedly a bold experiment, and it's good to see it going from strength to strength; whether it can change the way scientific discourse is conducted - opening it up in crucial ways - still remains to be seen. Let's hope so. (Via Open Access News.)

Acer: A Case-Study in How Not to Succeed

The Acer Aspire 5710Z has gone on sale in Singapore pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Ubuntu is currently one of the world's most popular and easiest-to-use Linux distributions.

But a spokesperson for Acer told ZDNet.co.uk on Tuesday that the company — one of the world's top laptop manufacturers — had "no plans" to sell any Linux-based systems in the UK. "[Acer models] with Ubuntu pre-loaded are available at the factory level. However, there is no demand for it in the UK. Therefore, those configurations are not an option [for UK customers] at the moment," said the spokesperson.

Well, let's just compare that with Dell, shall we.

Dell creates a site where people can tell the company what it wants. People ask for Dell systems running Ubuntu, people get systems running Ubuntu in the US. People then ask for Dell systems running Ubuntu outside the US, and it looks like that may well happen.

Acer, by contrast, does not ask anyone what they want. As a result, it has no clue what anyone wants, but being a superior company that knows much better than mere customers what they want, it knows full well that people outside the US don't want Ubuntu running on their laptops - even though that is what they are telling Dell.

Guess which company I shall be buying from when Dell starts selling GNU/Linux systems in the UK? Guess which company I shall be recommending to people when they ask for advice about buying PCs in the UK? Guess which company can go and get knotted?

Update: Maybe there's hope.

Selling (Digital) Brooklyn Bridges

In a move that seems like a great model of public and private cooperation, the National Archives and Amazon.com have reached a pact under which Amazon will sell films and video footage gathering dust in the archives’ vaults. These videos and films, which capture some of our most intriguing and important moments in history, are already available at no charge to folks who want to visit the archives’ facilities in College Park, MD, but now they’ll become available to anybody via the Internet.

So let me get this straight. Amazon makes money selling digital copies of archive material, which is freely available, back to the people who own that material: and that's a great model? When will Amazon starting selling digital Brooklyn Bridges, I wonder....