Whatever the Question, the Answer's GNU/Linux

It's interesting that whenever people try to come up with low-cost machines for developing countries, the answer is GNU/Linux. The OLPC/XO is the best-known example, but here's another one:

Rather than one inexpensive laptop per child, the answer being presented is a somewhat more powerful computer, with zero maintenance or moving parts, which can be shared by a number of children running free and open source software.

Of course, it's pretty obvious why: the cost of software is zero, which means there's no money there wasted on fat cats in Western countries. But there's another interesting angle:

Perhaps the oddest technical feature of the tablet-style PC is the fact that it runs an ARM-based RISC CPU, the Freescale i.mx31. The key reason for choosing this RISC CPU over a conventional x86 Intel or AMD processor was battery life. Morgan explained that this CPU's power envelope of just 3.5 watts made an 8-hour use possible. The other key reason was that this particular chip had strong video and graphics capabilities, which would be needed to show videos and animations in a classroom environment.

The downside is that it does not run the vast amount of x86 software out there.

The operating system is a cut down version of Debian Linux, recompiled for the ARM architecture, complete with most of the office and communications software expected in a GNU/Linux system.

Oh look: there's that wide platform support again: is this turning into one of open source's best-kept secrets? (Via Linux Today).

Loongson: GNU/Linux's Longshot

One of the under-appreciated strengths of GNU/Linux is its wide platform support. So what? you might sniff: the only platform that matters is Intel's. Well, yes - at the moment. But that could change courtesy of those nice people in the Middle Kingdom.

For Loongson - which readers will remember, is a Chinese chip company that has built a microprocessor surprisingly similar to one produced by MIPS - is hoping that Chinese government support will make its architecture rather important:

Once Loongson chips can meet basic demand, China plans buy them for its army, government offices, and public education. In addition, some local governments have been purchasing computers for China's rural areas to demonstrate the achievement of the "new country construction." It's estimated that China's rural areas will utilize at least 6 million computers in 2007 and 2008, giving Loongson a big boost in this arena.

Why is this good news for GNU/Linux? Because Loongson chips cannot run Windows - there is no MIPS port for XP or Vista. But there is already one for GNU/Linux, which is, amazingly enough, precisely the OS that those 6 million future machines (if they materialise) will be running. Hen hao.

Google's OpenSocial

Or should that be Open Social? - That's what a certain Marc Andreessen (now, where have I heard that name before?) calls it, and he should know:

My company, Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

* "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...

* "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

* With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.

* With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

What this shows, for the nth time, is that the future history of computing is about the race towards openness, and that the company that opens up the most - as in totally - wins. Google seems to get that, even if there are still a few dark corners of its soul that could do with some sunlight.

GNU Voodoo Strikes Again

Everyone is waiting for some juicy lawsuit that will establish the validity of the GNU GPL once and for all. But the trouble is, those who fail to follow the rules of GPL keep on giving up before these things come to trial. Here's another one - the Monsoon case I wrote about a little while back:

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox.

BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. One of the conditions of the GPL is that re-distributors of BusyBox are required to ensure that each downstream recipient is provided access to the source code of the program. Monsoon Multimedia uses BusyBox in its HAVA TV place-shifting devices.

As a result of the plaintiffs agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit and reinstate Monsoon Multimedia's rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL, Monsoon Multimedia has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Monsoon Multimedia of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid by Monsoon Multimedia to the plaintiffs.

That GNU voodoo is just too darn powerful, it seems.

Crowdsourcing the Language Ark

Samuel Johnson famously wrote an early English dictionary entirely on his own. But a far better approach today would be to write one collaboratively across the Internet, with people offering and refining definitions. And given the global nature of the Net, better make that a multilingual dictionary, too.

That's what LingoZ is trying to do. At the moment, the number of languages covered is relatively small; what I'd like to see is this widened to hundreds and then thousands of languages. As well as a useful resource in terms of translation, it could also play another important role: preserving the hundreds of languages faced with extinction as a kind of virtual ark. I'm not sure that LingoZ has the vision to do that, but somebody should. (Via eHub.)

Curling Up with Open Source

One of the heartening signs in the software industry is the continuing flow of donations to the free software commons. The latest to see the light is interesting because it's in a domain where open source code is fairly thin on the ground: Rich Internet Applications.

Curl, Inc. today announced its plans to release a significant body of code for the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform to the open source community. As the first step in its open source strategy, Curl will broaden its development platform and empower the Curl developer community by establishing a common repository of open source component libraries. As a result, developers will have all of the components required to support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs. Curl's Open Source projects are provided under the Apache V2.0 License and hosted by SourceForge.

For tools like this, the benefits of open source are clear: people are able to try out your products much more easily, and the code can be freely passed around, growing the size of the user base for practically no cost. Indeed, the power of this kind of viral distribution is so great it's surprising there aren't more such releases. (Via 451 CAOS Theory.)

Put Me Down for X

One of the interesting ideas for replacing the current patent mess is to use a bidding system. People - or, more likely, governments - would pledge a certain amount of money for any company that developed a drug to do "Y", with the result placed in the public domain. Clearly, these sums would be relatively large, but still much less than the current system, which involves pharmaceutical companies taking out patents on drugs that cost hundreds of millions to develop, and then charging thousands of pounds per individual course, and billions cumulatively.

That's not going to happen any day soon in the world of drugs, given the latter's rather inflated ideas of its own worth (just how many copycat drugs for rectifying rich people's excesses do we need?). But it might just work in the world of free software, and Cofundos are giving it a whirl:

1 Somebody misses an open-source software tool or library for a specific purpose, a feature in an open-source software or a plugin for an existing software. He describes the project to develop the software.
2 Requirements-Engineering: Other people help enhancing the description of the project by adding specific requirements and comments.
3 Bidding: Users who also like the project and need the resulting software, bid a certain amount of money, which they will donate to the project performer after its successful completion.
4 Offering: Specialists who are capable to perform the project and to develop the respective software offer to realise the project for a certain amount of money and within a certain timeframe.
5 Call for competitive offers: As soon as the sum of the bid amount exceeds the money requested by the first offer, a call for competitive offers is started and lasts for three week.
6 Accepting an offer: After the three weeks call period for alternative offers is elapsed, all bidders are requested to vote about which offer to choose. Bidders votes are weighted by the amount of their bid. The specialist with the majority of the votes is selected to carry out the project.

Neat. And, even better:

All ideas and contributions on Cofundos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. All project outcomes must be licensed under an OSI approved open-source license.

Also worth noting is that this could never work for closed source, since you cannot, by definition, add arbitrary functionality to such black boxes.

The only thing I'd say is that the sums on offer for new bits of code are currently rather low. This may well be lack of publicity - which is why I've giving some to what sounds like a fascinating attempt to think and do differently.

ODF - Nochmals "Ja, Danke"

Interesting:

In his words of welcome Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format." It was thus an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization," he declared. This in turn was a necessary ingredient of the knowledge society, he averred. Within the Federal Government the Federal Foreign Office is considered the strongest proponent of free software. After having early on networked its foreign missions with the help of open-source programs and migrated its laptops to Linux and OpenOffice the Federal Foreign Office intends to extend its program of migration to all workstations of its diplomats by the middle of next year.

Microsoft Buys Open Source (Talent)

I predict we'll see much more of this:

Microsoft has hired the creator of the SubSonic tool set and plans to use SubSonic as a key part of an upcoming platform.

...

SubSonic will remain under the same MPL (Mozilla Public License) 1.1 license it always has and will remain as completely open source as it always has, he said. "Nothing will change at all," he said. "I'm just getting paid, essentially, to work on it."

Conery said he had been working under contract with Microsoft for about eight months before the company hired him.

He is not the first developer of open-source technology hired by Microsoft to boost its developer division. The company hired John Lam, a Ruby expert, and Jim Hugunin, who delivered an implementation of Python for .Net, among others.

This is a shrewd move for Microsoft, which is following in the footsteps of Google. As Chris DiBona told me recently:

Google has been very public in the fact that we have three primary languages, and that's C++, Java and Python. So as part of that we try to bring on staff people who are the world leaders in those projects - Josh Bloch and Neil Gafter for Java, Guido on Python, Ian Lance Taylor and Matt Austern. We do that because having those people on staff, those projects can continue to move forward, and that's good for us; and also our use of the projects informs the directions sometimes where these projects can go.

So, seeing Linux in an environment like Google informs the direction of Linux in a lot of ways, because you get to see it in an extremely high-load, high-availability environment that you don't really see that often, and you see it on commodity hardware here. So that's really good for the outside world that Andrew [Morton] gets to see that, and that Andrew can really code whatever he wants.

You can't buy love, but you can certainly buy influence.

Now We Are (HTML) 5

Remember HTML? It's (nearly) back:

This specification introduces features to HTML and the DOM that ease the authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include the context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent events.

(Via Heise Online.)

Willy Nilly, Ageing Rocker Gets With It

Sir Cliff Richard, Tony's bosom pal, was one of the leading, er, lights in the effort to extend the sound copyright to a mere 95 years, instead of the current 50. Happily, that failed, but it's nonetheless surprising to see the music of the said musical knight being used for a nice bit of innovative thinking from EMI, one of the few music companies that seems to get it:

Benefiting from one of the first new digital directions from the new owners of EMI, from today, his latest album Love, The Album, goes for sale via online pre-order at £7.99 - with the price dropping the more fans make the purchase. The collection has a floor minimum of £3.99 and, no matter when a customer pre-ordered, they'll only pay the lowest final price.

Old Fogies Grok Openness, OK?

The Telegraph is a bastion of, er, right-thinking people; it also has an age profile that is similarly to the right. So I was astonished to read this review of the dinky little Asus Eee PC (I want one, I want one), which says things like this:

Asus has kept the cost down by using open-source software – it runs a Linux operating system rather than Windows, although future versions will be available with Windows; uses OpenOffice (oppenoffice.org) for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations; and has the excellent Firefox web browser for surfing the internet.

...

Asus assures me that most peripherals, such as printers and iPods, will work fine, as long as you download the necessary Linux driver.

...

At just over £200, people may be weighing it up against other options, such as an entry-level "normal" laptop, compromising an element of portability for additional computing functionality. Dell's laptops, for example, start at around £329 if you opt for one running the Linux Ubuntu operating system, or £399 for one running Windows.

In other words, it treats GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and open source as, well, normal. If this kind of stuff is appearing in the Telegraph - and the retired colonels aren't choking on the kedgeree when they read it - we're truly making progress.

A Brief History of the Software Patent Mess

As fascinating video of former Red Hat General Counsel, Mark Webbink, explaining where software patents came from in the US, and how Microsoft suddenly became fond of them.

In the Digital Age, Analogue Makes the Money

Further hints that the way to make money with digital content is to go analogue:

Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today's music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices.

"For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release," said Matador's Patrick Amory. "The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music."

Yup, yup and yup.

Well and Truly Bug.gd

Here's an interesting application of Linus's Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". The site bug.gd puts up an error message, and hopes someone can explain what to do. The frightening thing is this fact from TechCrunch:

Bug.gd has been seeded with 60,000 error messages and solution from Microsoft

Microsoft has solved 60,000 error messages? So how many million are left?

Oh, Well Done, Microsoft

Look: little Johnny Microsoft is doing *ever* so well in his plucky attempt to catch up with that clever GNU/Linux chap:

Microsoft Corp has made progress in getting its Windows software to work on a low-cost laptop computer for poor children that currently runs on rival Linux software, an executive said on Thursday.

The world's largest software company is now working to adapt a basic version of Windows XP so it is compatible with the nonprofit One Laptop per Child Foundation's small green-and-white XO laptop.

"We're spending a nontrivial amount of money on it," Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole said in an interview on Thursday."

But be warned:

"We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes," he said. "At the end of the day, there's no guarantees."

So, just remember that: when you're dealing with Windows XP, there are no guarantees. Unlike with GNU/Linux, of course, since it runs rather nicely on the XO already. Now, which would *you* rather have?

Intellectual Monopolies Are No Privilege

We often call copyright a species of intellectual property, abbreviating it, “IP.” This brief paper suggests that we consider copyright as another sort of IP: an intellectual privilege.

When I first saw this idea, I thought it was wrong, but for the right reasons: "intellectual property" does not exist, but calling it "intellectual privilege" is not the way to flag that up. For the lay person, it makes it sound like it's a privilege to access it. Let's call them what they really are: intellectual monopolies - which nobody is going to mistake for something nice and cuddly.

Against this background, I was glad to see Mike Masnick, that bellwether of sound thinking on these issues, broadly in agreement with me:

I'd tend to side more with those who refer to it as an intellectual monopoly, as that's much more descriptive. Intellectual privilege, for all the niceness of retaining the "IP" designation, probably requires too much explanatory baggage.

Good News, Ulaanbaatar

For my one reader in Mongolia, good news:

President Nambaryn Enkhbayar of Mongolia announced today his commitment to provide every child in his nation with a connected laptop by the end of 2010.

As a first step toward making this a reality Professor Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of the non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and Mr. Nyamaa Enkhbold, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, agreed to launch the OLPC initiative in Mongolia as early as January 2008 and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) thereof in the presence of President Enkhbayar.

In January, Mongolia and OLPC plan to launch a pilot project providing 20,000 units of the acclaimed XO laptops, to children ages 6 to 12 in the most remote parts of the country, as well as in the capital Ulaanbaatar.

I'll get me yurt....

It's a Fair Cop (But Society's To Blame)

Here's a heartening sign that the change of management at the top of the UK government (no names, no pack drill) is resulting in a little more rationality.

A few months ago, the government announced its intention of reining in the Freedom of Information Act by making it possible to refuse to give information on the basis that it would cost too much to do so (trust Tony to use tricks like this to get what he wanted.) Now that nice Mr Brown has killed this absurd idea:

In the consultation process, the majority of respondents opposed the proposed changes to the fees regulations. This was particularly the case with responses from media organisations, other non-governmental organisations and members of the public.

However, some public authorities, especially local authorities, welcomed the prospect of some relief from the administrative burden of the FOI Act.

Taking account of the range of responses received, the Government has decided to make no changes to the existing fees regulations.

It does intend, however, to deliver a package of measures to make better use of the existing provisions to improve the way FOI works and to meet the concerns particularly of local authorities.

The last par is still a bit worrying, but kudos to the government for actually *listening* to people when they were asked for their opinions.... (Via The Reg.)

High-Def, Low Interest

worrying about the high-def format war is a waste of time. And to be quite honest, I don't see these formats being around much longer anyway--movie downloads will quickly supplant media as the chosen form of entertainment once our Internet access speeds increase.

Quite. Part of the problem is that the manufacturers are more interested in "solving" the problem of copying than providing something that users want. No wonder the public doesn't really give a damn.

The Battle for the Soul of WHOIS

I am sufficiently long in the Internet tooth to remember the blissful days before ICANN existed. I say blissful, because from where I sit practically every change it has wrought has led to a degradation of the Internet's naming system: it is more driven by financial rather than technical concerns, more subject to lobbying, and generally more of a mess than it was ten years ago.

And now it looks like ICANN is up to yet more of the same, according to this post by Doc Searls about the battle for the soul of WHOIS (and doncha just the Beowulf references?):

Raise your hand if you use whois every day. Even if your hand isn't up, and you just regard whois as am essential sysadmin tool, this post is for you.

Because if you're interested in keeping whois working for the those it was made for in the first place, you need to visit the battlefield where whois' future is being determined right now. That is, you must be Beowulf to the Grendel that is the Intellectual Property Community. Worse, you must confront him in the vast cave that is ICANN.

Except ICANN is more like Grendel's cave, only a helluva lot bigger, and far more boring. It's easy for an outsider to be daunted by ICANN's labyrinthine bureaucracy, its complex processes, its mountain of documents, the galactic scale of its influence, the ecclesiology of its high-level gatherings and its near-countless topics of concern.

The real problem is summarised thus:

the intellectual property folks see whois as their enforcement database, and are working toward making that its primary purpose. Those two purposes are at odds, and that's what the debate is all about. Except so far the public comments have come mostly from just one side.

This is largely because of the completely opaque way in which ICANN operates. If I had my way, we'd get rid of it entirely, and start again; but given the vested interests at play, that's not exactly likely to happen.

"Open Source Does Not Mean Free": Huh?

Here's an interesting little to do:

Open Source does not mean Free: Why we are declaring a license for the community database

...

Very shortly you will notice an important change to our GPLv3 Resource site [at http://gpl3.palamida.com/]. This week's events have led to the decision to add a Creative Commons License (CCL) to the site to ensure that recent blatant plagiarism of our database contents by a newly launched GPLv3 site will be duly credited and/or cease. After two days of intense investigation, we have confirmed that most of our database has been copied directly – word for word and misspelling for misspelling, with very few original additions to our initial work. We feel that that this secondary site does a disservice to the open source community that has for many months diligently contributed data to our database, assisted in correcting discrepancies, and supported the accurate and timely tracking of GPLv2 and v3 conversations and conversions. It has always been the aim of Palamida to run our Resource Site like an open source project – encouraging collaboration, edits, transparency and commentary – so we understand that our data has always been free for re-distribution. However, we did not anticipate the entirety of our database being re-copied and re-packaged as original information without appropriately referencing Palamida as the source. We are disappointed to have to add any sort of copyright but have chosen an open source license in hopes of continuing the spirit of the resource.

Well, I hate to break it to you chaps, but if your original licence allowed the database to be copied (and I don't know if that's the case, but let's assume it is) it's a bit unfair to complain when someone, er, copies it. If you want credit - which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want - make sure the licence reflects that. If you don't want people to copy it, fine, but then it ain't "like an open source project".

Basically, sharing means sharing - and open source *does* mean free (subject to complying with the licence.) (Via C|net.)

O(A) Look: Now There's a Surprise

As I've mentioned, getting OA to US-funded research is proving incredibly difficult. Here's one reason why:

In a list of Sen. James Inhofe's top contributors for the 2001-2006 Senate election cycle, Opensecrets.Org identifies Reed Elsevier Inc. as his 11th largest contributor, with $13,250 in contributions. Opensecrets.Org notes:

The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Before he withdrew them, Sen. Inhofe was the sponsor of two amendments to delete or weaken the NIH Open Access Mandate in the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill.

I'm almost ashamed to have worked for Reed Elsevier long, long ago.

Open Source Mathematics

Suppose Jane is a well-known mathematician who announces she has proved a theorem. We probably will believe her, but she knows that she will be required to produce a proof if requested. However, suppose now Jane says a theorem is true based partly on the results of software. The closest we can reasonably hope to get to a rigorous proof (without new ideas) is the open inspection and ability to use all the computer code on which the result depends. If the program is proprietary, this is not possible. We have every right to be distrustful, not only due to a vague distrust of computers but because even the best programmers regularly make mistakes.

Seems pretty obvious, really: no open source, no transparency, no way of following the logic, no proof: QED.

And if you can't really believe closed source for maths or science, why should you believe it in business? How can you check an accountancy program, say, if you can't see the code? And don't even get me started on closed-source e-voting machines... (Via The Inquirer.)

Gawd Bless Project Gutenberg

I wrote recently about the tragedy of losing the IMSLM music score commons. Well, it looks like Mr Digital Commons himself, Michael Hart (he was the first, remember - Project Gutenberg began over a decade before GNU) has stepped in with a great offer to take it under his wing:

Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSLM Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.

This is a doubly good outcome: all that hard work is not lost, and it gets better infrastructure (and probably more access to legal advice.) (Via Slashdot.)