Open Sourcing the Singularity

Fab post of a presentation made yesterday by Jamais Cascio at the disconcertingly-named Singularity Summit (what - does it all fold up into a black hole at the end, or something?). Here's the punchline/punchpar:

My preferred pathway would be to "open source" the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests. Such a proposal is not without risks. Accidents will happen, and there will always be those few who wish to do others harm. But the same is true in a world of proprietary interests and abundant secrecy, and those are precisely the conditions that can make effective responses to looming disasters difficult. With an open approach, you have millions of people who know how dangerous technologies work, know the risks that they hold, and are committed to helping to detect, defend and respond to crises. That these are, in Bill Joy's term, "knowledge-enabled" dangers means that knowledge also enables our defense; knowledge, in turn, grows faster as it becomes more widespread. This is not simply speculation; we've seen time and again, from digital security to the global response to SARS, that open access to information-laden risks ultimately makes them more manageable.

It's true, he's said it before, but maybe not so eloquently.

Firefox Hit 400 Million Downloads

This is worth quoting at length:

On November 9th, 2004, you all started a movement. Spread Firefox, supported by tens of thousands of contributors, took just 99 days to deliver 25 million downloads of Firefox to a world of people desperate for a better Web -- a Web that didn't overwhelm them with pop-ups, a Web that didn't infect their systems with viruses and spyware, a Web that was fun again, simply put, a Web that worked.

In less than six months, you all doubled that number to 50 million downloads, turned open source into a household word and reasserted the supremacy of choice and simplicity.

It took the Spread Firefox global community of activists only one year to reach the 100 million downloads mark and to let the world know that innovation was alive again on the Web.

And just one year ago you all helped to double that number again, to 200 million downloads. More than 50,000 of you, with Spread Firefox buttons and banners, not only helped Firefox achieve an amazing download milestone, but you all helped to make Firefox one of the world's most recognized and respected brands.

Today, you all have done it once again. With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world's most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience. You all, the grass roots and the heart of the Firefox movement, have helped hundreds of millions of people find that better, safer, and faster Web.

Even though these are downloads, not installed versions, it's still important to note that the rate at which people are trying out or upgrading Firefox is accelerating: 100 million in one year, 200 million in two years, but 400 million in three years. It will be interesting - and indicative - to see what happens in a year's time.

Glimmer of Hope for US Patent System

A small step towards patent sanity has been taken:

The House approved the most sweeping changes to United States patent law in more than half a century on Friday in a victory for computer companies like Microsoft and finance companies like Goldman Sachs.

Specifically:

The measure passed by the House would change the rules at the Patent and Trademark Office so patents would go to the first person to file an application, not necessarily the first inventor. That would limit years-long disputes over who was the first to invent new technology and would bring the United States in line with other countries’ patent rules. It would also allow third parties to introduce evidence against applications and would create a system, called post-grant opposition, to challenge new patents.

In litigation, it would limit where patent suits could be filed so that cases are not concentrated in court districts deemed favorable to plaintiffs, create a new way to calculate damages to reflect the contribution of the invention to the overall product and allow immediate appeals of court rulings on the interpretation of patent terms while cases are proceeding.

Mobile Linux Goes East

There's an interesting graphic in this story, which shows how very different the smartphone market is around the world - and how big Linux is in China and Japan.

Why Open Source is Different

When you read the following, bear in mind it's written by someone who is running one of the most important - and successful - open source projects, Mozilla:

I few months ago I hurt my shoulder on the trapeze. Well, falling off the trapeze, actually. And it's probably more like 4 months ago, but who's counting? It wasn't a bad fall or a bad injury. My rotator cuff muscles complained and my arm ached for weeks. But still it counted as an irritating setback rather than a scary or serious injury.

In hindsight, I can see that this fall was exactly like the last time I did something scary and fell to the net. In both cases the underlying problem had been identified by the instructors repeatedly. In both cases I understood I should fix the problem. But in neither case did I understand that fixing the problem was a safety issue.

In this case the manoeuver is known as an "uprise." it's a move where one starts out hanging on to and below the trapeze bar and ends up with one's hips resting on top of the bar. The clearest video of an uprise I found of an uprise is actually a woman I fly with, although this video was taken in sunny outdoor southern California and not in the old warehouse where I fly. Here's a dark, harder to see video of an uprise by a classmate of mine in the facility where I fly. In both these videos the flyer is wearing safety lines; these allow the instructor to help the flyer if something goes wrong.

This is not your parents' CEO. Indeed, her actual job title is Chief Lizard Wrangler.

e-Postcard from Number 10

Ooh, look: an email from that nice man at Number 10 about my signing the petition against the Windows-only iPlayer:

The Government set up the BBC Trust to represent the interests of licence fee payers, and to ensure good governance of the BBC. The BBC Trust has responsibility for ensuring that the correct degree of scrutiny is given to all proposals from the BBC Executive for new services (such as the iPlayer) and any significant changes to existing services. To fulfill this duty, the Trust conducted a Public Value Test on the BBC Executive's proposals to launch new on-demand services, including BBC iPlayer. This included a public consultation and a market impact assessment by Ofcom. In the case of the iPlayer, following the consultation, the Trust noted the strong public demand for the service to be available on a variety of operating systems. The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish the findings.

Oh, so that's alright, then.

Bad Amazon, Naughty Amazon

So, Amazon's getting into the ebook business; that's nice. But:

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005

Bad, bad Amazon.

Enter the Open Komodo Dragon

I've always been struck by how little known the company ActiveState is, given that it's worked with many open source languages such as JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl. Now it's opening up its multi-platform, multi-language IDE:

With the Open Komodo Project, the focus is on dynamic languages and the open web. Open Komodo is developed on top of many open source technologies including Mozilla, Python, and Scintilla. The primary development technologies used include XUL, JavaScript, Python, and C/C++. The Open Komodo platform will be entirely open source and licensed under the same terms as Firefox: Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL).

The Open Komodo Project aims to create a full-featured web development tool for client-side web development integrated with Firefox, Mozilla's free, open source web browser, and based on the award-winning Komodo IDE. This new tool, codenamed Komodo Snapdragon, will be developed in collaboration with the open source community.

Sounds good, particularly the integration with Firefox.

Open Social Web: A Bill of Rights for Users

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

(Via eHub.)

MPAA Jets in To Spread Some Cinematic Fantasy

When are these people going to get a clue?

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Dan Glickman is today lobbying UK film minister Margaret Hodge, advisers to prime minister Gordon Brown and the UK Film Council to make camcorder recording in cinemas a criminal offence, FT.com reports.

I have no time for idiots who try to record films in cinemas - but they aren't the problem. As Michael Geist noted, when he was rebutting a similar attempt to force stupid laws on Canada, earlier research has shown it's mostly the film industry itself that is to blame:

77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders. Most of our samples appeared on file sharing networks prior to their official consumer DVD release date. Indeed, of the movies that had been released on DVD as of the time of our study, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks.

Criminalising the use of camcorders will simply be one more stupid piece of legislation, one more thing the police and legal system don't need, and one more paranoid response to a non-problem.

So MPAA, do us all a favour: save your fantasy world-views for the silver screen.

Is Silverlight for GNU/Linux Moonshine?

Hm, don't know what to think about this:

Over the last few months we've been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux. Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1.

I suppose it depends on how open the specification is - and whether it's just OOXML by any other name....

Anyone any thoughts?

Microsoft Loves Openness

Well, some openness:

BioMed Central, the world’s largest publisher of peer-reviewed, open access research journals, is pleased to announce that Microsoft Research has agreed to be the premium sponsor of the BioMed Central Research Awards for 2007. The BioMed Central Research Awards, which began accepting nominations in late July, recognize excellence in research that has been made universally accessible by open access publication in one of the publisher’s 180 journals.

"Microsoft’s External Research group is proud to be a sponsor of the BioMed Central Research Awards and feel it is important to recognize excellence in research," said Lee Dirks, director, scholarly communications, Microsoft Research. "We are very supportive of the open science movement and recognize that open access publication is an important component of overall scholarly communications."

It may only be promoting open science and open access at the moment, but I predict Microsoft will one day love open source just as much. (Via Open Access News.)

Chalk One Up for Larry & Co.

Nice little victory here for Larry Lessig and friends in their fight to defend the shrinking public domain in the US:

The 10th Circuit decided our appeal in Golan v. Gonzales today. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that the "traditional contours of copyright protection" described in Eldred as the trigger for First Amendment review extend beyond the two "traditional First Amendment safeguards" mentioned by the Court in that case. It thus remanded the case to the District Court to evaluate section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“URAA”) under the First Amendment, which removed material from the public domain.

This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress's change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a "traditional contour of copyright protection." Under the 10th Circuit's rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.

Pebble on the cairn. Good luck with the next one.

How Orange Can Become the Apple of Our Eye

Orange has repackaged some of its services for telecommuting workers into a portfolio called "Open Office."

And yet it doesn't think this might be confused with a certain office suite of a similar name:

A spokesman for Orange UK said that the telecommunications company's use of the name "Open Office" should not create any confusion because it did not refer to a software package, and the term was not yet a registered trademark in the U.K.

Well, maybe not, but how about this: as a gesture of goodwill, why doesn't Orange start offering links to (the other) OpenOffice.org on its site? It will cost it nothing, avoid confusion, and earn it plenty of brownie points with the free software world. Heck, it could even hook up its Open Office with users' PCs running copies of OpenOffice.org. What's not to like?

Open Standards Behind Closed Doors

This isn't right:

The British Standards Institution has sent its response to the International Organization for Standardization on the subject of whether Microsoft Office Open XML should be certified with the ISO, but has refused to say whether it voted "yes," "no" or "abstain."

Well, excuse me: how can we be dealing with open standards here when everything is done behind closed doors? Unless the process itself is completely transparent, there can be no confidence in the outcome.

Beyond the particulars of OOXML, this is something we need to sort out for the future, as truly open standards become increasingly central to computing - and the incentive for diluting them correspondingly greater.

Update: Apparently, to their credit, they voted against. But I'd still like more transparency.

Microsoft Spins Negative OOXML Result

Classic Microsoft press release here on the OOXML decision under the upbeat heading "Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process":

Today the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released the results of the preliminary ballot to participating National Body members for the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma 376 Office Open XML file formats) ratification process. The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML. Along with their votes, the National Bodies also provided invaluable technical comments designed to improve the specification. Many of the remaining ISO members stated that they will support Open XML after their comments are addressed during the final phase of the process, which is expected to close in March 2008.

Sounds almost like a "yes" - but note: no mention of the crucial "P" votes, and even the 74 percent is insufficient according to ISO rules:

Although no date has been formally set, the final tally is likely to take place in March 2008. ISO/IEC requires that at least 75 percent of all "yes" or "no" votes (qualified votes) and at least two-thirds of "P" members that vote "yes" or "no" support ratification of a format in the Fast Track process.

So we'll take that as a "no", then?

More analysis once we get all the details of how people voted, and how many comments there are, which together will show just how much of a "non" it was. One thing is certain: now begins the real work to make sure that the vote in March is fair and not bought.

Chinese Whispers

Here's another billion reasons why DRM'd music downloads will die out - and why copyright law will need to be rewritten:

Like millions of other young Chinese, he downloads them for free using Baidu.com (BIDU ), the country's biggest search engine. Baidu makes it so easy—just hit the MP3 tab on the home page, type in the name of the song, and click. What's more, Zhu doesn't believe he and his friends are doing anything wrong. "I think it's a problem with the law, not with us users," he says.

The Right to Roam and the Right to Read

Peter Murray-Rust has been coming out with some cracking posts recently. First, there was the charming story of OUP demanding that he pay $48 to use his own paper, whose copyright he holds, and which is CC-licensed, for teaching purposes.

Now he has a wonderful post contrasting the legally-enshrined right of public access to the wilderness to the lack of a right of public access to academic papers.

Philip Rosedale 1.5

If you ever wondered what happened to that nice Mr Rosedale, here's an update.

Note to SELF: Free Educational Material

Hot off tomorrow's press - the launch of Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF):

SELF is an international project aiming to provide a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards.

Of course this begs the question, What is free education material? To which SELF's answer is:

There are few existing definitions on what is Free Documentation, and almost no discussion of what is Free Educational Material, both of which have comparable roles in the SELF project. The most significant contribution to this debate has probably been made by the Open Access movement, in particular the Berlin Declaration but also by the Creative Commons project, which has initiated a debate about various levels of freedom in the field.

Based on their work and the principle of erring on the side of freedom, for the scope of SELF, Free Educational Material and Documentation are defined as follows:

1.

Unlimited use for any purpose

Similar to the first freedom defining Free Software, there must be no limitation on the use of the material. In order to qualify as Free, it must in particular permit use in commercial training activities.

2.

Modification

It must be possible to change the material so it can be translated, improved and kept up-to-date, as well as to enable collaboration and creation of new, combined materials.

3.

Distribution

It must be possible to distribute the materials in original, modified, and combined forms. It must be at the choice of the individual distributor to do this with or without a fee.

This definition should be strong enough as to not exclude SELF from the future Free Educational Material community, regardless of the details and outcome of its constituting definition.

What's (Open) Source for the Goose...

A report suggesting that the Chinese military has hacked into German government computers could have a negative impact on the prospects in Western markets of Chinese equipment vendors Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063 - message board; Hong Kong: 0763), believes an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort .

...

"The ability of Huawei and ZTE to participate in, let alone win, telecom infrastructure tenders in the Western hemisphere may have lessened considerably following last week's shock report," writes Lindberg in a research note issued Monday. "It could trigger a return to national security clearance when it comes to procurement of telecom networks," he adds.

OK, so this may be pure paranoia, not least because it's not clear that the alleged Chinese spyware has anything to do with the Chinese telecom equipment.

But there's a more general principle: if it ain't open, you don't know what's going on, so all this kind of stuff could be going on, unbeknownst to you. Of course, it also applies to Chinese procurement as well, which is one reason why I think open source is bound to win out there, as elsewhere.

After all, if you are a (paranoid) government flunky, do you really want to risk national security (and your post) on that black box? No, I thought not. (Via GigaOm.)

The Man from the BBC Speaketh

I've been pretty critical of many aspects of the BBC's online activities, not least its dratted Windows-only, DRM'd iPlayer. But in the interests of fairness I think I should point out this very good interview with the man responsible, Ashley Highfield, in the new UK version of PaidContent.

I still don't agree with the man, but he gives reasonable answers to the main questions, which are hard but fair. Kudos, too, to PaidContent for making both the interview recording and transcript available, and releasing the latter under a CC licence. This shows that it, at least, understands the new dynamics of the online content world. Good luck with the launch.

Koolu: Very Cool

Not hot, but definitely cool. (Via Eddie Bleasdale and his interesting new Trusted Computing Project - no, not that one....)

Open Source Darkstar...

...is here (and not just promised.) Well done chaps, nonetheless.

Open Science Means Open Source

The need for open access and open data in science seems obvious enough - even enough some persist in denying it. But as science becomes increasingly digital, with ever-greater dependence on computers and software, there is another aspect, as Nature Methods has recognised (but some months back - I've only just caught this):

The minimum level of disclosure that Nature Methods requires depends on how central the software is to the paper. If a software program is the focus of the report, we expect the programming code to be made available. Without the code, the software—and thus the paper—would become a black box of little use to the scientific community. In many papers, however, the software is only an ancillary part of the method, and the focus is on the methodological approach or an insight gained from it.

In these cases, releasing the code may not be a requirement for publication, but such custom-developed software will often be as important for the replication of the procedure as plasmids or mutant cell lines. We therefore insist that software or algorithms be made available to readers in a usable form. The guiding principle is that enough information must be provided so that users can reproduce the procedure and use the method in their own research at reasonable cost—both monetary and in terms of labor.

However, the editorial rightly points out that releasing the code as open source has huge advantages:

Some authors who favor the highest degree of transparency and sharing for their software elect to develop their programs in an open-source environment. By doing so, the authors not only provide accessibility and transparency, they also allow the community to build upon their own developments and make continuous improvements to the tool. Open-source software has become extremely popular in various fields. In microscopy, for example, image analysis software tends to be modular, and users benefit from the flexibility of being able to replace some modules with others in an open-source framework. Despite the tremendous added value of open source, other authors prefer to release a compiled version of their program, so as to protect commercial interests tied to sophisticated custom-designed software. This option is not optimal because it turns the program into a black box, but it may be acceptable if the operations performed by the software are sufficiently clear.

Although it is probably appropriate that Nature Methods, given its focus, should be the first to articulate this issue, it is important to appreciate that its logic applies to all scientific publishing where computers are involved. Without open source, there can be no open science - the only kind that is worthy of the name. (Belatedly via Flags and Lollipops.)