Job Title of the Week

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the appointment of Nick Van Wyk to the role of Senior Transformation Executive, in addition to his current role as Vice President, Global Operations.

Senior what?!?? If I had an shares in Red Hat, I'd probably sell them now - they're clearly out of their pram.

WIPO to Wipe Itself Out?

I've written before that WIPO needs to change to reflect the new realities of intellectual monopolies, but it seems the organisation wants to go even further by melting down completely:

Hundreds of employees at the World Intellectual Property Organization, a prominent United Nations agency, have signed a petition calling on WIPO Director General Kamil Idris to put the organisation’s interests before his own in addressing allegations that he misrepresented his age on official documents and possibly engaged in other untoward activities. Idris is under pressure to step down by countries that see him as having lost the ability to lead the organisation.

First the World Bank, now WIPO...who's next?

Apple Supports ODF

At last:

OpenDocument and Word 2007 Formats

Take advantage of TextEdit support for the Word 2007 and OpenDocument formats for reading and writing.

OK, so maybe not huge news in itself, but further evidence that the barriers to ODF are gradually falling. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

Patently Wrong, Mathematically Proved

Well, after yesterday's post about a paper drawing fascinating parallels between today's patent trolls and yesteryear's patent sharks, here's another zinger from academia, one of whose authors has just won this year's Nobel-ish prize for Economics. And look what it says:

the software industry in the United States was subjected to a revealing natural experiment in the 1980’s. Through a sequence of court decisions, patent protection for computer programs was significantly strengthened. We will show that, far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity, these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most.

We maintain, furthermore, that there was nothing paradoxical about this outcome. For industries like software or computers, there is actually good reason to believe that imitation promotes innovation and that strong patents (long patents of broad scope) inhibit it. Society might be well served if such industries had only limited intellectual property protection. Moreover, many firms might genuinely welcome competition and the prospect of being imitated.

What's interesting about this - aside from the fact that a respected economist is arguing against patents for industries like software, and using maths to prove it - is that the whole idea of welcoming competition so that everyone can build on the communal advances is incredibly close to the underlying dynamic of open source, which gets better much faster because it can always draw on the work of others.

So essentially the result of the paper is that industries like software work better (a) without patents and (b) when they operate according to the open source development model. Imagine. (Via Slashdot.)

Wikimedia Commons Hits Two Million Mark

Hooray for the commons:

Wikimedia Commons, the multilingual free-content media repository managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, reached the milestone of two million uploaded files on October 9, 2007, less than a year after it reached one million. This makes Wikimedia Commons the fastest growing large Wikimedia project. The rapid growth reflects the young age of the project, launched just over three years ago in September 2004. Since March 2007, Wikimedia Commons has routinely had over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is now not uncommon for over 5,000 files to be uploaded in a single day. The largest single-day figure so far has been the 9th of September 2007, when a huge 9719 files were uploaded in a mere 24 hours.

(Via DigitalKoans.)

Microsoft Now Officially Open Source...

..well, some of its licences, at least:

Acting on the advice of the License Approval Chair, the OSI Board today approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). The decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open source community that these licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the Open Source definition, and should therefore be approved.

This is surely the right decision: refusal on the grounds that it was Microsoft would have been petty in the extreme - and would have played straight into its hands. Open source is strong enough to welcome Microsoft into the fold, even if it is still something of a black sheep. It will be interesting to see what the company does with its shiny new licences. (Via 451 CAOS Theory - Matthew Aslett's new gig for those who don't already know.)

Why Monocultures are Bad for You

In 1987, the Great Storm struck south-eastern England; one result was the mass destruction of many woodlands:

Because the hill was effectively a monoculture of mature beech trees of a similar age, it did not surprise Mr White that so many were lost in the storm.

Twenty years on, the woods are growing back - some of them naturally, not in a managed way as they were before the storm. The result?

As part of the recovery programme on the hill, the National Trust formed a partnership with English Nature to see what would happen if 50 acres (20Ha) of the 450-acre (180Ha) site was left to recover naturally.

"There is a very high percentage of dead wood in there," Mr White revealed, "which is now home to invertebrates, which birds obviously feed on.

"And the fungi are absolutely magnificent, especially at this time of year. There is a very varied ecology; a mature and advanced ecology."

The lessons for the ecosystem of software will not be lost on readers of this blog....

Parenthetically, I was there when the Great Storm struck. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a cheerful little piece about it, reproduced for your delectation below:

Windy City

Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips. Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power. With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done. An enormous silence hung over the whole building. Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong. The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead. Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack. No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity. Everywhere there were scenes of destruction: huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road. Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement. People milled around, some taking photographs. There were no trains and few buses. An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said. And the radio itself was strangely different. Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes. The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped. Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee. A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave. It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87. 'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'. The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature. Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable. But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable. A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London. No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power. Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently. Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death. After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave. That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable. In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze. Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

Apache and the Art of the Press Release

Here's some interesting commentary on my recent post about Apache's declining market share in the Netcraft survey:

The Netcraft numbers are changing for one reason and one reason only: because a very large and powerful entity is doing whatever they can to change those numbers, even if it means creating millions of bogus sites. Even if it means paying registrars large sums of cash to move their parked domains over to IIS. Anything. It is of prime importance for them to be able to "beat" Apache, and we are seeing the result. People aren't switching to IIS. Companies aren't switching to IIS. Hosts aren't switching to IIS. At least not for technical reasons. MS needs this marketing success. It needs to "prove" that IIS is beating Apache and, by logical conclusion, MS is better than Open Source. Can't we all already predict what the press release will say? So with something so important on the line, and with a survey that can now be easily fudged, the battle call is "Change Netcraft!"

Of course, the graph itself makes it clear that on a certain day Microsoft decided: we will overtake Apache, cost what it may. But my point stands: whatever dirty tricks Microsoft may use to achieve that goal, it doesn't matter - it's too late.

The same post also links to this alternative web survey, by Security Space, where Apache still dominates utterly.

A Historic Idea: How to Deal with Patent Trolls

Do not miss this fascinating paper, which looks at spooky parallels between today's patent trolls, and what were called "patent sharks" in the 19th century - people who bought up (agricultural) patents purely with a view to extracting money from hapless and helpless victims. Even better than the historical parallels are the lessons to be learned:

The chief lesson that emerges from this comparison is that certain types of patents are more vulnerable to trolls than others. Opportunistic licensers flourish when there is a large gap between the cost of getting a patent and the value that can be captured with an infringement action. This sort of arbitrage is likely to occur when: (1) those being sued cannot easily substitute away from the disputed technology; (2) the average scope of improvements in the industry is incremental, which makes the outcome of infringement litigation hard to gauge; and (3) the cost of acquiring and retaining patents is low. Farm tools and modern tech patents share this set of traits, albeit for different reasons, and hence they suffer at the hands of trolls more than other types of patents.

The other lesson that can be drawn from the Gilded Age experience is that the flood of opportunistic litigation cannot be stemmed through substantive changes in patent rights. First, industries unaffected by trolls view these proposals as harmful to their rights and lobby hard against them. As a result, every effort to address the issue through a comprehensive solution has failed in Congress. Second, since trolls and sharks succeed as long as they reach settlements, a substantive solution will be ineffective because most of these cases never get to court. So long as there is some uncertain chance that an infringement suit will succeed, defendants will tend to settle. In the nineteenth century, Congress eliminated this risk by wiping out the patents that were fueling opportunistic litigation. This suggests that abolition may be the only solution for modern trolls, at least with respect to patents for business methods and software.

Yup: make business methods and software patents history.... (Via TechDirt.)

New York Goes Green With Shame

Not really my patch, but I'd expected better from NYC:

But the market for Ipé wood drives much of the industrial logging of the entire Amazon, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. An emergent flowering tree, which peppers the canopy of the Amazonian rainforest in hues of pink, magenta, yellow and white, Ipé grows in the rainforests at densities of only one or two trees an acre. This means that vast areas of the forests are razed to the ground to feed the market for a single tree. It is estimated that, for every Ipé tree cut, 28 other trees must be cut and are thrown away. For New York City's 10 miles of boardwalk alone, over 110,500 acres (130 square miles) of old growth Amazon rainforest were logged.

Even more shocking, most of this logging is illegal. According to Scott Paul, Greenpeace forest issues specialist, in 2006 90 percent of Brazilian deforestation was the result of illegal logging operations. Many logging businesses are run by criminal syndicates and compliant government officials. This fact is hardly a secret: In 2000, the Brazilian government's own estimates indicated that 80 percent of the hardwood exported from that country was illegally harvested. Briefing papers prepared by Rainforest Relief about the criminality and environmental impact of the city's wood procurement policies were provided to the Bloomberg administration.

But despite rampant illegality, climate change and mass extinction, Bloomberg's administration persists in procuring wood from tropical rainforests. And it is not just the Parks Department, but a number of city agencies which have largely ignored proposals for existing economically and environmentally sound alternatives.

This, surely, is a case ripe for blogosphere noise. (And yes, I know Blog Action Day was yesterday, but better late than never.)

BBC iPlayer: Converted in a Flash

Well, here's an interesting confluence of two of my pet hates:

By adopting Adobe Flash Player software, the BBC will make its free catch-up TV service — BBC iPlayer — available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Windows, by the end of the year. The strategic relationship will also allow the BBC to provide a single consistent user experience for the majority of streamed video and audio content on www.bbc.co.uk.

Note that this is only for the streaming service: downloads are still Windows only. Still, it's a neat partial solution for GNU/Linux. Not only that, it emphasises an interesting shift that has taken place with Flash.

Once, Flash seemed to be used only for serving up annoying ads or time-wasting games. But increasingly it's turning into the cross-platform media player of choice, a job it does rather well, I have to admit. And so I'm forced to concede that Flash might not be quite so evil as it once was.

How to Sell Books

I've written before about how those selling content need to pay more attention to the packaging; it looks like the Vatican has got the message:

The Vatican's Secret Archives, one of the world's great repositories of historical documents, is selling a limited edition of 800 numbered copies of the Chinon parchment.

It is printed on synthetic parchment, comes complete with a reproduction of the original papal wax seal, and is packaged in a soft leather case together with a scholarly commentary.

Each copy will cost just over 5,900 euros ($8,000; £3,925).

Update: Here's an interesting, and rather less flippant, post exploring the same idea (Via Open Access News.)

BBC News Goes Offline; A Lightbulb Goes On

I too noticed that Auntie was off making the tea, yesterday:

For several hours on Thursday afternoon, the front page of the BBC News website was slow to respond, sometimes displaying error messages. Other sections of the site were also affected at various times during the afternoon.

It's a rare event and it caused some comment on technical websites, and also theories about what might have happened - was the BBC changing its webserving providers? Was it a redesign problem? Was it "computer gods punishing us for iPlayer"?

Ah, self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

Is Apache About to Get Scalped?

Certainly looks like it:

Apache loses 2.8% share this month, partly through the strong growth at the major blogging systems, and partly due to 2.5 million domains on Apache expiring at trouble-free.net. Apache has around a 10% market share advantage over IIS now, which is the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996.

The only consolation is that Apache's job is done: it has the shown the way. Today, if necessary, we can live without Apache as an example of how Microsoft can be beaten in a market, because the total open source story is now so strong.

Xara's Failure: Half Closed, Half Hearted

We are so used to the Cathedral and the Bazaar story of how the open source methodology succeeds that it is easy to forget that it can fail. Here's a classic case: Xara Xtreme, which was nominally open sourced a couple of years ago. Despite that, the project never really took off and is now moribund. Why?

Numerous developers told Xara point-blank that they would not devote their time and energy to working on Xara Xtreme while its CDraw core remained closed source. Xara persisted with its original stance, in essence telling the developer community that the community was wrong: the code it had released was enough, and they should start working on it and stop complaining.

Other companies take note: open sourcing is not to be undertaken lightly. And if you do go that route, you go all the way: half-heartedness does not work in a world where the main fuel is passion.

FROG Hops into the Open Source Commons

FROG - FRee Online druG 3D conformation generator - is not a program I was aware of, but it sounds pretty cool:

Frog is an on-line service aimed at generating 3D conformations for drug-like compounds starting from their 1D or 2D descriptions. Given the atomic constitution of the molecules and connectivity information, Frog can identify the different unambiguous isomers corresponding to each compound, and generate single or multiple low-to-medium energy 3D conformations, using an assembly process that does not presently consider ring flexibility. Tests show that Frog is able to generate bioactive conformations close to those observed in crystallographic complexes.

Cooler still, its code is being released under the GPL:

On behalf of the OpenBabel project, I am pleased to announce that Dr. Bruno Villoutreix (INSERM, University of Paris 5) and Dr. Pierre Tufféry (INSERM, University of Paris 7) have generously donated their code to OpenBabel. This code will be incorporated into OpenBabel under the GPL in the coming months, making fast and accurate SMILES-to-3D conformer generation available to the open source community for the first time.

The open source commons just got richer. (Via Peter Murray-Rust.)

Exchanging Exchange for OpenChange

Because of its hooks into the rest of the stack, Exchange is one of the key programs for turning companies into Microsoft shops, so this could be quite important if it comes to fruition:

OpenChange aims to provide a portable Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols. Exchange is a groupware server designed to work with Microsoft Outlook, and providing features such as a messaging server, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks.

We are working on two different aspects:

* Provide interoperability with Exchange protocols. This is the MAPI library development purpose (libmapi). MAPI stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface and is used within Microsoft Exchange. The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients and offer native compatibility first with Exchange server; and in a near future with OpenChange server. As a proof of concept and in order to keep the implementation close to what developers shall expect, we are developing a gnome-evolution plugin which relies on libmapi.

* Provide a transparent replacement to Microsoft Exchange Server with native Exchange protocols support and direct communication with Microsoft Outlook. This basically means that OpenChange server won't need any plugin installation in Outlook. The server is tighly linked to Samba4 since it is developed as an endpoint module for smbd (the samba server daemon). One of the main objective with the server development is the abstraction layer architecture we are working on; it would not be sane for long term development either to rewrite a messaging server or to work with a single existing product. As a matter of fact, openchange should be able to run with any messaging server. For the first technical preview, we will surely orient the development towards a sqlite backend for testing purposes and a postfix one for production one.

(Via tecosystems.)

Towards the Instant PC

Here's an interesting straw in the wind:

I just got a chance to try out a Webware PC: a computer built around the new P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard from Asus. What makes this motherboard be hardware for Webware is that it has a Firefox Web browser (running on an embedded Linux operating system) burned into ROM. It also has Skype. You turn it on, and in fifteen seconds (I timed it), you can be in Firefox and surfing the Web.

The logical conclusion of this would be to have thousands of free apps running on an embedded GNU/Linux operating system, all burned into ROM, ready to run almost instantly. As the cost of storage - both disc-based and flash - comes down, this kind of thing is going to be more and more feasible.

Why Open Source Works - Honestly

People often wonder why the open source development process works - why hackers selflessly code for the greater good. There are obviously lots of reasons, but one is captured by this BBC piece:

We all know about honesty boxes. In staff rooms and clubhouses across the country there are boxes for hot drinks or food that rely on members of a community making their fair contribution towards the cost of something.

The principle has been applied in the real world. In the US there are newspaper vending machines that rely on the consumer putting his coin in and not taking more than one paper.

And in Britain, at WH Smith branches in train stations, the customer is asked to make their payment for a newspaper into a container.

According to the company, the "vast majority" pay the correct amount, and one of its shop assistants even reported the boxes make money as people who don't have the correct change over pay. However, they could quite easily pay less or even walk off with the paper for nothing having feigned the act of paying up.

Copyright Olympics

Good to see an eminent writer getting it:

It's not just that the idea of copyrighting an entry in the English dictionary, or someone's face, haircut or name, is ridiculous. There is an issue of principle. By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. For scientists, this constrains the use of public and published knowledge, up to and including the human genome. For artists, it implies that the only thing you can do with subject matter is to sell it.

(Via TechDirt.)

Let's Make That a Round Trillion, Shall We?

Just to be on the safe side, you understand:

A Brussels think-tank has accused the US government of reneging on commitments made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over internet gaming.

Panellists at a trade forum levelled harsh criticism at the US, focusing on a burgeoning trade clash between the US and Europe over internet gaming.

The forum believes that the US could be liable for up to US$100 billion in trade concessions to European industries after placing illegal discriminatory trade restrictions on European gaming operators.

(Via Slashdot.)

Read All About It! - But Not in Newspaper

I'm making a promise to myself, and now to you, to reverse this trend. The future of journalism, not just newspapers, depends upon such loyalty. And now I pose this challenge to you: It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper -- emphasis on paper, not pixels.

No, no, no, it's got to be clay tablets - I mean, why pick one particular modern instantiation? Let's at least go back to the origins of news.

And if you want to know why the suggestion that we all rush down the newsagents is simply a waste of time, try this, from the same misguided article:

I have no proof, but a strong feeling, that even journalists, especially young ones working at newspapers, don't read the paper. That feels wrong to me -- and self-defeating.

You don't think this could possibly be because they realise there are better ways of getting and conveying information these days? Just like more and more musicians realise that there are better ways of making a living from music than selling bits of plastic with little holes in them. (Via IP Democracy.)

Creative Commons in the Agora

If the Creative Commons licences are all Greek to you, try this.

Delving into the Dingly Dell

Interviews are a great way to get the background to important areas, but too often they concentrate on the big names (and I'm guiltier than most). So it's refreshing to come across somebody unknown but with an interesting perspective on things - in this case, Dell's embrace of GNU/Linux for ordinary users, seen through eyes of John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team there:

Ubuntu is already a great Linux distribution, so we try to only make changes where we can add value. Our primary focus is to get all necessary hardware support and bug fixes into the distribution itself, so that we don't have to make any changes to the shipping code. For those important bugs or hardware support that don't make the distribution, we'll make modifications to the factory-installed image as necessary. We add driver packages and scripts on top of the standard operating system to make sure our the customer experience is as nice as possible. Up to this point we have tried to minimize the changes we have made.

Business Week Goes Open Source, Apparently

Or so it says:

We're introducing this type of open source aggregation into the new magazine, with blog items, quotes, and content from unusual, global sources surrounding stories, sometimes enhancing them, sometimes disagreeing with them. It's a conversation, not a lecture.

We shall see.