Wu's He?

On Nov. 5, Google (GOOG) unveiled what many in the phone business had long awaited. CEO Eric Schmidt explained how the search giant was ready to create new software for mobile phones that would shake up the telecom status quo. A Google-led "Open Handset Alliance" would provide consumers an alternative to the big cellular carriers and give them new choices among mobile phones and the types of nifty services that run on them, from e-mail to Google Maps.

Google's brain trust was again trying to change the rules of the game. Behind the scenes, they owe a sizable debt to a man nearly unknown outside the geeky confines of cyberlaw. He is Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who provided the intellectual framework that inspired Google's mobile phone strategy. One of the school's edgier profs, Wu attends the artfest Burning Man, and admits to having hacked his iPhone to make it work on the T-Mobile (DT) network.

And the ever-modest Larry throws in the following helpful signpost:

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has been the leader in arguing for reduced restrictions on what can go up on the Internet, predicts that Wu will become even more influential than he himself has been: "The second generation always has a bigger impact than the first."

Clearly, a name to remember.

Red Hat Enters Cloud Cuckoo Land

There has been a lot of interesting blogospheric comment on Red Hat's latest move:

Cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a web-scale virtual computing environment powered by Amazon Web Services. It provides everything needed to develop and host applications: compute capacity, bandwidth, storage, and the leading open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Cloud computing changes the economics of IT by enabling you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use. Compute capacity can be scaled up or down on demand to accommodate changing workloads and business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cloud computing makes it easy to develop, deploy, and manage your new and existing applications in a virtual computing environment.

One point, though, seems not to have been picked up. And that is that open source has unique advantages in the cloud, er, space. Since open source applications are freely available, there is no barrier to expanding your use of the cloud at no extra cost (though I do wonder how support contracts are going to work there). Moreover, anyone can provide cloud computing versions of open source apps running on GNU/Linux, including dedicated services concentrating on specific sectors - leading to a highly efficient market.

I suspect that for the mainstream proprietary apps, the only people who will be able to offer them will be their respective software houses (given the complexities of licensing on in-house servers, imagine how messy it's likely to get with virtual systems potentially varying by the hour). Not much of a market there, methinks.

DRM's Worst Nightmare: Profit

This is what will finish off DRM:

Killing DRM is saving digital music, reckons British retailer 7Digital. The company says DRM-free music sales now outnumber sales of DRM-enumbered music by 4:1 , and credits EMI with the shift.

Removing the locks and keys also helps shift albums, with 70 per cent of MP3 sales by value being full albums.

Music companies that fight the move to DRM-less music are fighting against profits - and their shareholders might not like that....

Using a Commons to Protect a Commons

Here's some joined-up thinking: providing open access to key greenhouse figures:

The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (A.B. 32) requires CARB to adopt regulations creating a greenhouse gas registry by Jan. 1, 2008, putting in place what appears to be the country's most comprehensive and sophisticated greenhouse gas registry.

The proposed regulations were developed with input from public and private stakeholders, state agencies and the general public. Modeled after the California Climate Action Registry (CCAR), a voluntary greenhouse gas reporting program started in 2001, the regulations detail which industrial sectors will report, what the reporting and verification thresholds and requirements will be, and how calculations will be made. Approximately 800 facilities will be required to report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which CARB estimates will represent 94 percent of California's total carbon dioxide production from stationary sources.

(Via Open Access News.)

Openbravo Acquires Librepos

Here's a classic example of an open source micro-acquisition:

This acquisition will benefit the Librepos community of users and developers for several reasons. First, the continuation of Librepos is now guaranteed, Librepos will be an independent product of the Openbravo portfolio hosted in Sourceforge, and is and will be open source and licensed under the GPL. Forums will continue actively and there will be frequent releases of Librepos. Openbravo is a company truly committed to open source and believes in the strengths of the community to drive innovation.

Second, I will continue to be involved in the future of Librepos. I am the founder and main developer of Librepos since I published Librepos in January 2005. Now I joined Openbravo as Senior Architect and Librepos is part of my responsibilities. This is also great for me because previously to this acquisition I used to spend my spare time on Librepos, now I will have more time for Librepos, because now Librepos is part of my job.

One of the biggest problems with young open source projects that depend on one or a few key coders is ensuring their survival and continuity. Being bought is one obvious way to do that, with the benefits listed above. In fact, the benefits are far greater in the case of a small open source project than they are for a small closed-source product company.

As the comment above points out, open source projects, even successful ones, are often part-time jobs for the coders - something that is rarely the case in the world of traditional software. Bringing several smaller software projects together, as with Openbravo and Librepos, really is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

What's Wikipedia Got Against Open Source?

This is curious:

In case you didn't notice, Openbravo does not have an entry in the English edition of the Wikipedia, the fine community driven encyclopedia.

For some reason, the word Openbravo has been "blacklisted" and any attempt to create an entry about Openbravo gets automatically deleted.

Given the open source-y nature of Wikipedia, you would have thought it would have had a natural tendency to look favourably on open source companies like Openbravo. So what gives, Jimmy?

Comparisons Are Odorous...

...but useful. Here's a nice analysis of the rather crowded open source systems management sector, with a graph of downloads by month. As the post notes:

The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project. Download volume isn’t a perfect measure, but it is one of the best available. I doubt even the projects themselves have an absolutely accurate idea of how many installations they have.

(Via 451 CAOS Theory.)

BBC: Bound to Be Beaten on iPlayer?

Interesting:

We met with Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium (OSC) last night, directly after his meeting with the BBC to discuss opening-up the iPlayer to run on more platforms than just the Microsoft browser.

It appears that the meetings were positive and boiled down to two points, the BBC feels they haven’t communicated their desires for iPlayer properly and that they want the iPlayer to run on an open platform.

That seems to offer some hope things are moving in the right direction. This, on the other hand, guarantees it:

Both Mark Taylor (OSC) and Becky Hogge (Open Rights Group) will be taking part in a discussion with the BBC to further discuss the iPlayer situation this Friday at 10am.

The BBC stands no chance against those two....

Update: Here's the OSC's official report on the meeting.

Happy Birthday, GNU/Linux

RMS sends his own characteristic birthday greetings to celebrate the marriage of GNU and Linux:

15 years have passed since the combination of GNU and Linux first made it possible to use a PC in freedom. During that time, we have come a long way. You can even buy a laptop with GNU/Linux preinstalled from more than one hardware vendor, although the systems they ship are not entirely free software. So what holds us back from total success?

(The answer, in case you were wondering, is "social inertia".)

More on Mobile Linux

Both the Open Handset Alliance and [the LiMo Foundation] leverage open source business models, and both rely on industry leaders to contribute market-proven technologies to open source community. Many of the players/members/founders are the same OEM and silicon companies in each camp to remain relevant to operators who narrow down to a single Linux platform, whichever they select.

LiMo and the Open Handset Alliance will likely both achieve many of their consortium goals in the market, avoiding a zero sum game. In fact, it doesn’t have to be that Open Handset Alliance is the exclusive platform for any OEM or carrier, or even exclusive Linux platform, but very clearly the open source counterbalance will be a LiMo compliant platform. Linux fragmentation still exists and will for some time Outside of the Linux world, however, competition from other platforms including Symbian and Microsoft is immense, intense, pervasive, and won’t sit idly by as the Open Handset Alliance and LiMo try to gain traction. For either partnership’s long term survival, its imperative that the two determine how to co-exist and even mutually benefit from one another at the expense of the non-Linux and fragmented Linux parties.

This is particularly interesting because it comes from Wind River, a member of both the Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation. Even more interesting is the fact that it was a long-time rival and opponent of mobile Linux, but afterwards saw the light, and is now an important promoter of the latter.

Why Linux is Great, Part 9392

What makes the code in the kernel so great is not that it goes in perfect, it's that we whittle all code in the treee down over and over again until it reaches it's perfect form.

So says Dave Miller, and he should know.

Beyond a Game

Sixth Floor Labs LLC, a Linux game development company, has launched their business today. Founded by Ethan Glasser-Camp and Carl Li, the company aims to improve Linux's desktop feasibility through the creation of high-quality games. Games are "sold" to the Internet community through the "ransom model" -- for one large payment, the product is released under the GPL and freed forever.

If this reminds you of something, maybe it's this:

The ransom model offered by Sixth Floor Labs follows in the footsteps of the Blender Foundation campaign, which raised 100,000 EUR in seven weeks, and the Free Ryzom ampaign, which raised pledges for 170,000 EUR in twenty-five days.

But this goes far beyond games - or even open source. It's essentially the model that has been proposed for many domains, for example drug development.

Instead of today's creaking system of drugs protected by pharmaceutical patents, one suggestion is to offer a bounty - a big one - for the company that comes up with a solution to a medical problem. Instead of patenting that solution, it is then put into the public domain - rather as Sixth Floor Labs propose doing with their games once the "ransom" has been paid - for anyone to exploit.

MuleSource Hits a Million (Downloads)

MuleSource is not the highest-profile of open source companies, but it is certainly storming away:

MuleSource (www.mulesource.com), the leading provider of open source infrastructure and integration software, today announced that Mule has surpassed the one million downloads milestone. Following an initial open source release in 2003 by creator Ross Mason, Mule has become the enterprise developer's most-used integration platform, and is currently deployed in more than 1,000 production environments worldwide. A partial list of Mule users and customers can be found at http://www.mulesource.com/customers/.

This kind of hidden success is just so typical of open source these days: there's lots going on, but only at moments like this does it surface.

How Do You Do, Dojo?

New one on me:

Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. It builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, f(m)), which is why we refer to it sometimes as a "unified" toolkit. Dojo aims to solve some long-standing historical problems with DHTML which prevented mass adoption of dynamic web application development.

(Via 451 CAOS Theory.)

Let a Thousand Mobile Linuxes Bloom

One of the (many) question marks hanging over Google's Open Handset Alliance is how it fits in with the other mobile Linuxes out there - and what they think about it. Well, this is what LiMo says:

“The LiMo Foundation welcomes the news of Google’s mobile initiative. We believe Google’s entry into the mobile industry and the launch of the Open Handset Alliance further validate mobile Linux as the foundation technology enabling convergence within and beyond mobile,” said Morgan Gillis.

But Mandy Rice-Davies doubtless applies.

Radiohead Do It Again

They really get the hang of this new music stuff, don't they?

LIMITED EDITION 7 ALBUM USB STICK - 10 DEC

Strictly limited edition 4Gb USB stick, shaped in Radiohead's iconic "bear" image and housed in a bespoke deluxe box. Contains all seven Parlophone albums (including one live album) available as CD quality WAV audio files. Also contains digital artwork for each album.

Let us count the ways: time-limited edition; .Wav format, original digital artwork, wacky physical format. Yup, that's cool. (Via paidcontent.org.)

The Java Phoenix

What a difference a year makes.

In 2006, Java was looking distinctly long in the tooth. Widely used, yes, but hardly an exciting technology. Then Sun finally adopts the GNU GPL, and - whoosh. Two clear signs of this have appeared just recently (it takes that long for these things to work their way through the system.)

The first, obviously, is the gPhone, which seems to be using Java extensively (although it's hard to tell how, just now). The other is Red Hat's agreement with Sun:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to advance open source Java software. Red Hat has signed Sun’s broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

In addition, Red Hat has signed Sun’s OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement. This agreement gives the company access to the test suite that determines whether an implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) platform that is derived from the OpenJDK project complies with the Java SE 6 specification.

Red Hat is the first major software vendor to license the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), in support of Java SE compatibility. To help foster innovation and advancement of the Java technology ecosystem, Red Hat will also share its developers' contributions with Sun as part of the OpenJDK community. These agreements pave the way for Red Hat to create a fully compatible, open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

GPhone: Microsoft Still Not Picking It Up

So the GPhone has landed, or rather:

“We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, who led the effort to develop the software.

And, of course, it's how they're enabling those 1,000 companies to create GPhones that's critical:

The software running on the phones may not even display the Google logo. Instead, Google is giving the software away to others who will build the phones. The company invested heavily in the project to ensure that all of its services are available on mobile phones. Its ultimate goal is to cash in on the effort by selling advertisements to mobile phone users, just as it does on Internet-connected computers.

It's a totally different model: you make it as easy as possible for companies to design the phones, you help them sell as many as possible, and then make your money from the user-base. Microsoft's John O’Rourke, of course, still doesn't get it (or maybe just pretends not to):

“They may be delivering one component that is free,” he said. “You have to ask the question, what additional costs come with commercializing that? I can tell you that there are a bunch of phones based on Linux today, and I don’t think anyone would tell you it’s free.”

Sorry, John, that's was "free as in freedom", rather than "free as in beer".

Update 1: Lazy me: here's the original press release. And another thing: note that as well as GNU/Linux, as expected, there is also Java. Now consider what might have happened had Java not be GPL'd....

Update 2: Here's a nice quote from one of the Mr Googles hisself:

Sergey Brin: “As I look at it I reflect, ten years ago I was sitting at a graduate student cubicle. We were able to build incredible things,. There was a set of tools that allowed us to do that. It was all open technologies. It was based on Linux, GNU, Apache. All those pieces and many more allowed us to do great things and distribute it to the world. That is what we are doing today, to allow people to innovate on today’s mobile devices. Today’s mobile devices are more powerful than those computers I was working on just ten years ago. I cannot wait to see what today’s innovators will build.”

RMS will be pleased at the rare call-out for GNU there.

Update 3: Whoops, should've spotted this:

The one I really can’t figure out is this: how did Google (and friends) manage to build a “complete mobile phone software stack” built on the GPL licensed “open Linux Kernel” that’s itself licensed under the “commercial-friendly” Apache v2 license that protects would-be adopters from the “from the ‘viral infection’ problem.” Before you ask, yes that’s a direct quote, and yes I think using it is an exceptionally poor decision. I expected more from you, Google.

Very odd.

A Question of Standards

Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog is one of my favourites, because he clearly knows what he is talking about, and this means his analyses in the area of standards are highly insightful. But here's an interesting move:

In my case, this blog is the tool that I control that can project my voice the farthest. And unlike so many media channels today, its audience is not self-selected to be conservative or liberal politically. What this tells me is that I have the opportunity, and perhaps the responsibility, to use this platform when appropriate not to tell people what to think, but to raise questions that need to be thought about, and perhaps encourage others to do the same as well.

Accordingly, this is the first in a series of pieces that you can expect to appear on Mondays on an irregular basis, each introduced with the name "The Monday Witness." The topics will vary, but the common theme will be to highlight instances of action and inaction in the world today that violate widely held standards of human decency.

I think this is absolutely right: as blogs grow in importance and stature, they become an important new way of communicating with people that cut across traditional - and usually unhelpful - political lines. This doesn't mean that all bloggers should immediately starting ranting on random subjects close to their heart (besides, I already do that...), but it does open up interesting possibilities for engaging in a wider discourse.

The 3D Digital Commons as Metaphor

A few months back I wrote about a video showing an intriguing project that built on the commons of public images posted to Flickr and the rest. By patching these together it was possible to recreate full, 3D representations of public spaces.

There's now a site with more info about this, as well as a paper on the subject:

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset. For example, a search for “Notre Dame Paris” on Flickr yields more than 50,000 images showing the cathedral from myriad viewpoints and appearance conditions. This kind of data presents a singular opportunity: to reconstruct the world’s geometry using the largest known, most diverse, and largely untapped, multi-view stereo dataset ever assembled. What makes the dataset unusual is not only its size, but the fact tha it has been captured “in the wild”—not in the laboratory—leading to a set of fundamental new challenges in multi-view stereo research.

What's striking about this research - aside from the results, which are pretty dramatic - is that it provides a perfect metaphor for the benefit of pooling digital resources to create a commons. In this case, 2D pictures, many of limited value in themselves, are patched together to create an astonishingly detailed 3D representation of places that goes far beyond any single shot. And the more photos that are added, the richer that commons becomes. Exactly like all other digital commons.

Web 2.0 is Dead, Long Live Openness

An interesting post from Tom Foremski, who, even if he doesn't always grok the underlying dynamics of open source and its offshoots, is certainly plugged into the right people in Silicon Valley, and is very sharp about spotting trends there:

Whenever I meet with VCs I've noticed that there is a growing distaste for Web 2.0 startups. The "Web 2.0" term, in connection with a startup, and as a collection of concepts, is very tired in this community.

I think this is good news. Although I've used "Web 2.0" as a shorthand for a group of sites/services/technologies, what is much more important are the driving forces behind them. And those, quite simply, are openness, sharing and the Net-based, distributed methodology pioneered by open source. The more we concentrate on those core currents underneath, and the less on the trendy froth on top, the better.

The Bookless Author

Somebody looking at the bigger picture:

The past few days I have been in talks with Sina's VIP Book Channel. We will sign a contract on 11 November so that henceforth I will no longer put out books in print. I will write exclusively online, giving my readers material on Sina VIP. Qimen Dunjia will be my last print novel.

Many readers may be asking themselves: why?

The reason is very simple: environmental protection. Since I began writing horror novels in 1999 I have published 14 books [list of titles omitted]. How much paper was used to market these books across the country? How many forests were chopped down? The unlimited space online wastes neither paper nor ink—it doesn't consume resources. Sina's VIP Books has opened up a new model for reading: authors get income, the environment is preserved, and the audience can read things easily and cheaply. At the same time it is a blow to piracy—it accomplishes several things at one stroke.

Open Source and Virtual Deals

As usual, Matt Asay is spot-on with his analysis of Fonality's acquisition of Insightful Solutions, especially here:

With this Fonality + Insightful/SugarCRM solution, customers will benefit from a unified solution that connects employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360-degree view of customers and business partners.

Given SugarCRM's technology role in this deal, I'm surprised that SugarCRM wasn't involved in the press release. However valuable Insightful's technical understanding of SugarCRM, it's still SugarCRM's code that sits at the heart of this acquisition.

Having said that, it's perhaps telling that open source enables a close relationship with SugarCRM...without a close relationship. Most of SugarCRM's code is open, thereby enabling Insightful to build expertise that would be difficult to achieve with a proprietary product.

In effect, deals can be "done" without asking permission or even telling the other partners involved. The latter nonetheless benefit from the enrichment of the ecosystem surrounding their products that new uses generate.

A Passionate Plea Against Patents

One of the winners of the the 2007 essay contest on "Equitable access: research challenges for health in developing countries" is the following passionate diatribe against the murderous inequity of patents:

The usual, if untenable, reason for granting patent monopolies is that excess revenue is spent on research for new drugs and that this stimulates further research and leads to more innovations. On the contrary, there is hardly any pharmaceutical company that spends more than 15% of its annual revenue on research. The rest goes to other things: advertising, marketing, lobbying, etc. Their research on diseases found in developing countries has always been insufficient. New drugs for the treatment of tropical diseases are rare and far between, and are often not the result of pharmaceutical industry research. Research is expensive and requires lots of money, no doubt. It takes resources to generate innovation. However, maintaining pharmaceutical patents is even more expensive. Like Belding Scribner’s shunt, innovation must address needs and reach the people who have those needs; otherwise it is not innovation.

What we need is a paradigm shift, a new way of organizing, promoting and financing research and innovation, one that would ensure an intercontinental balance of interests and research priorities.

(Via Open Access News.)

I'm Sorry, Dave, I Can't Tell You That...

One thing I often hammer on about is the essential re-usability of open content. Here's a good example: AskWiki, a kind of semi-intelligent front-end to Wikipedia that lets you frame questions it attempts to answer autonomously using that body of information:

AskWiki, developed in partnership between AskMeNow and the Wikimedia Foundation, is a preliminary integration of a semantic search engine that seeks to provide specific answers to questions using information from Wikipedia articles.

What's particularly cool is that is also applies classic Darwinian evolution through collaborative refinements:

Users can improve the accuracy of the AskWiki engine via the categorization feedback mechanism. Users can categorize each AskWiki Answer as an article deemed either Correct, Incorrect or Uncertain. This user feedback is processed by AskWiki to improve the search capabilities and accuracy of the AskWiki engine.

Members of the AskWiki Community are encouraged to expand upon correct answer articles and correct the incorrect or uncertain ones, re-categorizing the articles as they are updated. These efforts are tied directly into the AskWiki engine as well.

Although very simple at the moment, this has great potential. Wikipedia is rather passive, waiting for you to find stuff; AskWiki, by contrasts, tries hard to "understand" what you want, and give it to you. Now extrapolate the "understand" bit, and you get something very interesting.... (Via Language Log.)