Permission to Reincarnate, Sir

This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

(Via Slashdot).

Through a PRISM Darkly

Ho-ho, things are hotting up among the opponents of open access:

The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) was established to protect the quality of scientific research, an issue of vital concern to:

* scientific, medical and other scholarly researchers who advance the cause of knowledge;

* the institutions that encourage and support them;

* the publishers who disseminate, archive and ensure the quality control of this research; and

* the physicians, clinicians, engineers and other intellectual pioneers who put knowledge into action.

Implying, of course, that open access has has no research integrity, does not advance the cause of knowledge, and is somewhow opposed to intellectual pioneers.

This is a really important development, because it is the clearest demonstration yet that the traditional publishers see open access as a real threat, and that it is succeeding - you don't take these kind of measures against something that is flailing. For the best rebuttal of the misleading issues and non-issues raised and obfuscated on this site, see Peter Suber's comments.

Open Sermons

If you allow people to read and listen to your ideas for free, you just might actually benefit the kingdom of God. At the same time you increase your own audience, and your potential impact. Who knows — if you are actually good at what you do, someone might hear you speak and think that you have something important to say, or that the way you are saying things resonates with people better than the same message packaged differently has done so in the past. This could even result in an invitation to speak at a conference or colloquium, or to write an article for publication.

Obvious, really. (Via Open Access News.)

In Cloud Cuckoo Land

John Markoff's hard disc died; he tried doing without it:

What I discovered was that - with the caveat of a necessary network connection - life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google’s Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data

Interestingly, I had not one but three of my computers die within the space of a few weeks. Like Markoff, I am obsessive about backing up data, so I didn't lose anything important - other than the ability to access local files.

So I'm now largely living La Vida Online: Firefox as my computing environment, accessing Gmail, Writely (as I still prefer to call it), plus a few other online sites for storing various kinds of files and links. It works pretty well, and even when I get some new systems up and running, I'm aiming at prolonging my stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Hi-De-Hi HiPiHi

One of the first detailed looks at what promises to be an important entrant in the virtual world space.

Ambushed by Patents

I've not written about the Rambus case before, because it seemed frankly rather dull. But I was wrong: there is an important principle at its heart:

European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded ''unreasonable'' royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

The EU's preliminary charges, announced Thursday, come weeks after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruled the company deceived a standards-setting committee by failing to disclose that its patented technology would be needed to comply with the standard.

As a result, every manufacturer that wanted to make synchronous dynamic access memory chips had to negotiate a license with Rambus.

Both EU and U.S. antitrust officials allege that this allowed Rambus gain an illegal monopoly in the 1990s for DRAM chips used in personal computers, servers, printers, personal digital assistants and other electronics.

Clearly these kinds of patent ambushes are potentially a general problem, and indicate why real standards must only allow completely patent-free technologies. If a company wants its patented technology to become a standard, it must give its patents.

Snap Shot Update

Gone in a snap - it seemed to be slowing things down. Anyone care about its snip?

Get the Straws in the Wind

More tiny steps by Microsoft towards openness:

In Linux circles, Microsoft's anti-Linux site, Get the Facts, was better known as Get the FUD, and was seen as more of a joke than a convincing argument in favor of Microsoft products over Linux. Microsoft may have come to agree that the site was not serving any useful purpose, as the company closed it down on Aug. 23.

Will Free Software Licences Be Derailed?

Upholding licences is crucial to the success of free software, so potentially, this looks really bad news:

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward.

Although the judge's analysis is superficially worrying for the way he interprets the licence, there is an important fact in this particular situation, which has already involved tussles over software patents:

At issue was model train software code that Jacobsen and some other open source developers wrote, called the Java Model Railroad Interface, or JMRI, which is licensed under the Open Source Initiative approved Artistic License.

Now the Artistic Licence, originally drawn up by Larry Wall for Perl - and whose name was chosen purely for the pun it allowed - is a notoriously loose licence. IANAL, but it seems to me that the problem the judge has with granting an injunction against the model train software company is that the Artistic Licence simply gives, well, too much licence.

I may be wrong, but I think the far more demanding GNU GPL would avoid this problem - another good reason for choosing a more rigorous licence. We shall see whether I am right....

Laying Down the Law

Those open and sharing memes are spreading like wildfire in the most surprising places - like law, for example. In the US, there are two new important projects to place legal decisions online, freely available to all. There's Carl Malamud's database of legal opionions, and Tim Wu's AltLaw project.

But the thing that interested me most was a comment to the announcement of latter, which pointed out that that these US-based efforts are actually trailing equivalent moves elsewhere. The excellent site World Legal Information Institute has links to over a dozen of them. Shame on me for not discovering them sooner.

The Value of Free

Nothing new here for readers of this blog, but good to see others moving in the same direction:

I believe we should consider anything we publish on the web as an advertisement: promotion material, and only that. We can use this to sell the following:

* pretty or convenient copies (maybe we will see the reappearance of the artful music album!)
* signed copies
* limited edition high quality copies (things one can proudly display on a wall at home)
* time: live performances!

Blogging Open Stack Integration

One of the great but rather submerged stories in the open source world is stack integration. With the exception of the LAMP stack, free software solutions have been rather fragmented, with little inter-project coordination. One important development in this space is the creation of the Open Solutions Alliance, whose main task is ensuring better cooperation between disparate products.

I wrote about this recently, and I notice that the OSA blog is quite active at the moment. It's a good place to find out what exactly is happening in this important but neglected area.

I'm Back....

...be very afraid.

Radio Silence

For anyone that cares - well, there might be someone - Radio Opendotdotdot is falling silent for a few days. Back soon.

Oh, Tell Me the Truth about OOXML

The ODF vs. OOXML battle is really hotting up - a sure sign that this is important. One of the key issues is whether OOXML can ever be fully implemented by anyone else other than Microsoft: if it can't, then it can hardly be called a true open standard. Here's some analysis that suggest is can't. Not that will stop it becoming one....

Putting some (Source)Fire under ClamAV

The open source anti-virus software project ClamAV is one of my favourite pieces of free code. I've used it for years now, and recommended it to dozens of people. But I've always been a bit worried about its business model: could it continue to grow?

Well, now it looks like it can, since Sourcefire, creator of SNORT, has acquired the project:

With nearly 1 million unique IP addresses downloading ClamAV malware updates daily across more than 120 mirrors in 38 countries, ClamAV is one of the most broadly adopted open source security projects worldwide. ClamAV has also been recognized as comparable in quality and coverage to leading commercial anti-virus solutions. Most recently, at LinuxWorld this year, ClamAV was one of only three anti-virus technologies to provide a 100% detection rate in their live 'Fight Club' test featuring live submissions from the show audience.

Under terms of the transaction, Sourcefire has acquired the ClamAV project and related trademarks, as well as the copyrights held by the five principal members of the ClamAV team including project founder Tomasz Kojm. Sourcefire will also assume control of the open source ClamAV project including the ClamAV.org domain, web site and web site content and the ClamAV Sourceforge project page. In addition, the ClamAV team will remain dedicated to the project as Sourcefire employees, continuing their management of the project on a day-to-day basis.

As the above points out, ClamAV was one of only three anti-virus technologies to provide a 100% detection rate, and this only reinforces my confidence is using it day-in, day-out. If you don't know it, do take a look. (Via Matthew Aslett.)

Paying the Price of Intellectual Monopolies

Oh look, here's unnecessary, Draconian intellectual monopoly regulation that has major negative consequences:

An unexpected implication in the legislating procedure of the proposed EU Directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRED2) puts legitimate businesses under clear threat of criminal sanctions.

Now, why am I not surprised by this?

The Triumph of Free (as in Beer)

With The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal said to be looking at removing the “pay wall” around their online content, and others – including CNN, Google and AOL – having already done so, one question springs to mind: Are we seeing the death of paid content online, and the return of free as a business model?

Yup - at least, free as in beer: now we need to work on the free as in freedom part.

Google Health...

...is coming. And you thought the privacy issues of using Google were bad now. (Via John Battelle.)

Not So Au Courant

This piece from The Courant is like the coelacanth: not very pretty, but fascinating for its atavistic traits:

Unlike copyright-protected software, such as Microsoft's Windows, open source software is available either as a free public-domain offering or under a nominal licensing fee.

Well, no. To be strictly open source, software must have an OSI-approved licence. Such licences generally (always?) depend on copyright law for their enforcement. So, by definition, open source software uses copyright as much as Microsoft's Windows, just for different ends.

This was a common confusion when free software started appearing in the mainstream, but it's quite surprising to see it popping up nowadays.

Of Open and Closed Geography

Talking of the price we pay for idiotically closed geographical data:

The United States has benefitted in many ways from having public data sets that are freely used by scholars, commercial firms, consultants, and the public. An example of this is the TIGER system (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/) Many countries do not, and one British geospatial expert estimated that the closed nature of their system has cost them one billion pounds in lost business.

(Via Open Access News.)

The Idiots of OS (Ordnance Survey)

This really makes my blood boil.

After a year of negotiations, academic geographers have conceded defeat in their attempt to find a way to make a pioneering 3D representation of the capital, Virtual London, available to all comers via the Google Earth online map.

Followers of Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign will have guessed the reason: Virtual London is partly derived from proprietary data owned by the government through its state-owned mapping agency, Ordnance Survey (OS). What makes the situation bizarre is that Virtual London's development was funded by another arm of the government, the office of the mayor of London.

In other words, I helped pay for this information, twice - as taxpayer, and as London ratepayer - and yet I am not allowed to access it.

The Ordnance Survey's excuse is pathetic:

OS said granting Google special terms for Virtual London would be unfair on other licensees. "We provide an open, fair and transparent set of terms for providers seeking to operate in the same commercial space as each other. We cannot therefore license Google in a different way to other providers. We are completely supportive of anyone putting our data on the web as long as they have a licence to do so." Google would not comment.

Commercial space - and what about the public space, you know those tiresome little people that pay for your salary?

Thanks for nothing.

Open Source's Best-Kept Secret Redux

About 18 months ago, I wrote a post called "Open Source's Best-Kept Secret" about Eclipse, how wonderful it was, and yet how few knew about it. Now what do I find?

Eclipse may be the most important open-source "project" that people outside the industry, and even some within it, have never heard of.

Yup, Matt and I agree again. His piece is an excellent interview with the head of Eclipse, Mike Milinkovich. I also interviewed him recently, for my feature about the open source ecosystem in Redmond Magazine. Matt's ranges more widely, and is probably the best intro to what Eclipse is up to, how it functions, and why it is so important.

Indeed, I wonder whether it will actually prove to be the most important open source project of all in the long term. As Matt points out:

In late June, Eclipse made available the largest-ever simultaneous release of open-source software, called Europa: 17 million lines of code, representing the contributions of 310 open-source developers in 19 countries. Twenty-one new tools were included in the "Europa" release, all free to download.

Think about that. The Linux kernel has around 6 million lines of code.... The Java Development Kit that Sun open sourced has 6.5 million.... Sun's StarOffice release in 2000 (which was believed to be the largest open-source release to that point) had 9 million.... Firefox has 2.5 million.

Yeah, think about it....

They Gave Me of the Fruit...

...and I did eat:

But now an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as “open science,” this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. That’s especially true when it comes to creating and using the basic scientific tools needed both for downstream innovation and for solving broader human problems.

Open science proposes changing the culture without destroying the creative tension between the two ends of the science-for-innovation rope. And it predicts that the payoff – to human knowledge and to the economies of knowledge-intensive countries like Canada – will be much greater than any loss, by leveraging knowledge to everyone’s benefit.

"Sharing the fruits of science", it's called. Nothing new, but interesting for the outsider's viewpoint. (Via Open Access News.)

Welcome to the Era of Personal Genomics

I've been wittering on about personal genomics for some time: well, it's here, people. If you don't believe, me, take a look at this site (note, it's one of those old-fashioned FTP thingies, but Firefox should cope just fine).

Not much to see, you say? Just a couple of boring old directories - one called "Venter", the other "Watson". And inside those directories, lots of pretty massive files - some 35 Mbytes, some double that. And inside those files? Oh, just some boring letters; you know the kind of thing - AAGTGGTACCATTGACGCACAGGACACAGTG etc.

Nothing much: just the essence of the first two people to have their entire genomes (or nearly) sequenced - and all made freely available.... (Via Discovering Biology in a Digital World.)