JK Rowling Misunderstands the Magic of Sharing

"It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author's hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

Sorry, darling, it is not only reasonable to produce this kind of reference work, it is actually beneficial - to you, and the world. Not least because it discourages people from coming up with killer one-liners like this:

The big news from the world of Harry Potter isn't that Dumbledore is gay. It's that J.K. Rowling is greedy.

Unlocking the Value of Open Innovation

It's a truism that there are more clever people out there than in here, wherever "here" may be. So it makes sense to try to tap into that cleverness - which is precisely what open source and cognate movements attempt to do. Now it looks like business is slowly getting the hang of this:

Barrick’s Unlock the Value program is a unique opportunity for scientific problem solvers. We invite proposals for an economically viable way to recover silver from silica-encapsulated ore. For proposals judged to have merit, Barrick will:

* Fund your research
* Pay you a consulting fee
* Provide resources and expertise
* Help you develop and test your idea

For a method or technology that is successfully implemented, Barrick will pay a performance bonus of $10,000,000.

(Via Peter Murray-Rust.)

Oh, Tell Me the Truth About Mobile

I don't really understand mobile, but I do understand its importance. So the news that the British company Volantis will be releasing a big gob of code as open source was clearly nice:

Volantis Systems, which provides the Intelligent Content Adaptation software delivering mobile content to more than 250 million mobile phone users worldwide, today eliminated price as a barrier to entry for companies that would like to capitalize on Volantis solutions to deliver content to mobile users. The Volantis Mobility Server is available immediately as a free download, and in the first quarter of 2008, Volantis will release the product under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version three, in the process contributing 1.2 million lines of code, based on seven years of development, to the community.

With more consumers and corporate customers moving toward the mobile Internet, enterprises need a simple way to build Web sites for mobile devices. Volantis Mobility Server provides an inexpensive path for companies to create this content and easily distribute it to the wide variety of mobile browsers on the market.

Which is all well and good, but couldn't you just do that with a CSS stylesheet? I asked Mark Watson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Volantis. He very kindly explained to me in words of one syllable why it was a smidge more complicated than that.

The basic problem is that there is no standard 640x480 resolution on mobile devices, which come in just about every shape and size imaginable, with handset manufacturers constantly adding more as they seek to differentiate their products from the others. This means that you need to reformat your Web stuff hundreds, if not thousands of times, depending on the device. And no, Google's Android doesn't really help here, because you've still got the hardware to cope with. This is clearly a pain, and where there is pain there is always a business opportunity to reduce that pain for gain - hence the existence of Volantis.

So, you might ask, why is Volantis giving away its crown jewels? The usual story: it currently has a number of jolly big customers, and thinks, probably rightly, that it will make more dosh if is has thousands of smaller customers. Since the latter are unlikely to fork out large sums for software, the code is going open source, with money made on services, as per usual.

Sounds sensible to me, but what do I know?

Yikes! I've Been Blognapped

Not that I egosurf or anything, you understand, but I happened to notice that somebody was linking to me:

glyn moody wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
CARTES & IDentification 2007, Villepinte, France, November 13, 2007–Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, today announced it has attained Gold Certified Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program. …

Except, of course, I wrote no such interesting post....

Bizarre.

Android: Kitted Out with WebKit

Well spotted by GigaOM: one of the key components of Android is WebKit:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.

As Om notes, this is a significant vote of confidence for WebKit, and a reminder that most other browsers - even rather popular open source ones like Firefox - are behind in this particular race. Also, rather a pat on the back for KDE....

Of Bazaars and Dangerous Co-location

I often bang on about modularity in this blog, and its critical importance to creating and running open projects. Here are some more thoughts on the subject, along with many interesting ruminations on creating a Raymondian bazaar, and the state of open source companies today. It concludes by answering a key question it posed itself:

Why do so many open-source projects not have the active community of external contributors they are hoping for? Because they have been largely developed by co-located teams of hired software engineers, 100% dedicated to the project, managed and organized like any traditional software development effort. This seems to be especially true for the new crop of ‘custom build’ open-source companies, which would like to take advantage of the open-source business model. They might hope to also enjoy the advantages of the open-source development model one day, but achieving that requires a conscious effort.

Good stuff.

Sick, Sick, Sick: The Sickness Deepens

I've warned you about this bloke before:

Intellectual Ventures LLC, a low-profile investment firm run by former Microsoft Corp. executive Nathan Myhrvold, is laying plans to go global: It hopes to raise as much as $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from universities in Asia.

The move could help the firm, formed seven years ago to purchase patents and help inventors dream up new ones, expand its already-vast store of patents. But the new push also could exacerbate concerns that Intellectual Ventures will begin launching lawsuits to pressure companies to pay for use of its intellectual property.


Mr. Myhrvold said that his firm hasn't sued anybody for patent infringement but that he can't rule it out in the future.

That's a "yes", in case you were wondering. (Via Against Monopoly.)

More on Dzonghka: Microsoft's Morals

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for Bhutan's Dzonghkha language and its use in free software, so I was naturally intrigued by Andrew Leonard's recent post on the subject. This led me to the following, which somehow I had missed when it first came out:

Microsoft has barred the use of the Bhutanese government’s official term for the Bhutanese language, Dzongkha, in any of its products, citing that the term had affiliations with the Dalai Lama. In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since “Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace “Dzongkha” with ‘Tibetan - Bhutan’.”

How's that for a perfect confluence: Dzongkha-Tibetan-Chinese repression-Microsoft-free software? Nothing like a little moral prostitution to boost that bottom line, eh Microsoft?

UK Government Votes for e-Voting Quagmire

The UK Government has this crazy idea about IT: that if they say "make it so" often enough, it is so. But what they fail to realise is that complex IT projects are, er, complex, and often/usually go wrong. Stamping your pretty little foot ain't gonna fix it. As a result of this institutional ignorance/stupidity/wilfulness, it looks like the government is ploughing on with the doomed e-voting idea. When will they ever learn?

Go, gOS, Go!

Recently I wrote about the Everex Green gPC TC2502, sold by Walmart. On the product page at Walmart there are some fascinating comments, including the following:

I was surprised/shocked when it booted to Linux instead. My initial thought was someone had bought the machine, put Linux on it and returned it. However once it loaded up and was "green" everywhere I realized it was the way it's supposed to be (it matched the box's color).

So I began to think I'd need to take it back, but after working with it and letting my relative work with it I was absolutely amazed at how quickly she picked up on the concepts and ideas. The large desktop icons make it very easy for her to navigate, the big search bar makes it even easier.

We cleaned off the apps I don't think she'd be interested in or ready for (facebook, stuff like that) and left her with a wonderfully simple desktop that she was hooked on.

Assuming that this isn't a really cunning GNU/Linux fanboy masquerading as a super-satisfied customer, I think this is a significant straw in the wind. For those whose computing needs really are basic - typically older, rather than younger people - this ultra-low cost, ultra-simple PC could be a really effective solution.

One, moreover, that Windows-based PCs will never match until Microsoft starts giving away its software - as, precisely, it is starting to do in places like China and Russia. Even then it will have problems because of software bloat that GNU/Linux is mercifully unaffected by.

Google Book Search: Boons and Banes

You're probably not big into antedating - the academic game of finding earlier citations of words and phrases. But here's an interesting tale, because it shows the pros and cons of Google Book Search:

this discovery is typical of how Google Book Search now provides limited assistance to participants in what Erin McKean recently called "the competitive sport of antedating." Bonnie Taylor-Blake happened upon the relevant volume of Car Life but had no way of determining the precise context or even the correct issue and page number because of the limitations of Google's "snippet view." Fortunately, the metadata for this record includes accurate volume information ("v.9 1962-1963"), which allowed Bonnie to zero in on the correct page in a library copy of Car Life.

In other words, Google Book Search tantalises the antedater by showing earlier uses, but makes it awkward if you want to pin down the details. This is yet another reason why we need full-text open access to all books: otherwise, imagine the antedaters' anguish.

Android's Unity in Diversity

By choosing the relatively liberal Apache licence for its Android platform, Google runs the risk of fragmentation - something that the stricter GNU GPL tends to avoid. The company is evidently conscious of this:

a spokesperson for Google told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday that the OHA had foreseen these pitfalls. "All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won't modify [the code] in non-compatible ways," said the spokesperson. "That is not to say that a company that is not part of the OHA could not do so."

That's all fine and dandy, but it will interesting to see how it pans out in practice.

Also Spricht Peter Suber

There can be little doubt that the principal voice in the open access conversation is that of Peter Suber, who tirelessly gathers every crumb of information in this area, and then garnishes it with insightful comment on his Open Access News blog.

So it's rather paradoxical that the literal sound of that voice is something that is rarely heard. Good, then, to have this chance to encounter the man himself in this extensive interview, which also provides a handy primer on what exactly all this open access lark is about.

Finally, MULTICS Goes Open

The source code for the grandfather of Linux, MULTICS, has finally been released:

This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.

Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.

(Via OSNews.)

The Androids Are Coming

Well, they've arrived, actually, but what exactly does that mean? If you want to start to find out, the new Google site has plenty of technical info. Alternatively, for a more analytical perspective, there's a good piece at ONLamp.com, which draws on a chat with Mike Cleron, Senior Staff Engineer at Google and Technical Lead for Android.

Patently Outrageous

Europe does not allow software patents, but that doesn't stop some people - patent lawyers, mostly - from circumventing that clear and specific intention. One of them has not only written a book on how to sneak software patents through the system, but is now challenging an eminently sensible ruling on the subject by the UK authorities last year.

But the bits that stick in my craw are the following sections of the accompanying press release:

High-tech businesses can obtain a European-level monopoly over the distribution of computer disks and internet downloads of programs that configure an apparatus to perform a patented process. Now, in Britain, they cannot.

and

“A lot of people think there is no problem here because disks and downloads are protected by copyright,” noted Nicholas Fox, of Beresford & Co, the patent attorney acting for the high-tech five. “However, that is just not true. Copyright protection only protects code against copying. In contrast, patent protection enables a company to monopolise an invention even if competitors independently come up with the same idea.

Got that? These poor little companies just absolutely must have a monopoly on ideas to stop others from coming up with the same idea *independently*, because, you know, intellectual monopolies - like all monopolies - are just so good for society, and we can't allow other people to have the same ideas on their own without paying, oh my word no, because - heavens! - art and science might actually progress. And we can't have that, can we?

It's sad enough writing a book on how to get around a clear legal statement of intent; but brazenly demanding the right to a monopoly in what amounts to mathematical knowledge (as all software is, embodied in logical operations and algorithms) really takes the biscuit.

Full of Fail

Lovely piece here on the underwhelming launch of somebody's phone thingy in the UK. Makes yer proud to be British....

Fun Fiscal Facts of Firefox

Somewhat belatedly, The New York Times has caught up with the rumblings in free software community about all the dosh Firefox is raking in thanks to its search engine deals, and its possible over-dependence on Google. Nothing really new there, but it does have some juicy figures:

According to Mozilla’s 2006 financial records, which were recently released, the foundation had $74 million in assets, the bulk invested in mutual funds and the like, and last year it collected $66 million in revenue. Eighty-five percent of that revenue came from a single source — Google, which has a royalty contract with Firefox.

Despite that ample revenue, the Mozilla Foundation gave away less than $100,000 in grants (according to the audited statement), or $285,000 (according to Mozilla itself), in 2006. In the same year, it paid the corporation’s chief executive, Mitchell Baker, more than $500,000 in salary and benefits. (She is also chairwoman of the foundation.)

Hm: $500,000 a year - who says free software doesn't pay?

The Art of the Remix

One of Larry Lessig's favourite concepts is that of the remix: taking pre-existing stuff and doing something new with it. Recently I came across one of the purest expressions of that remix idea in the shape of the Georg Baselitz exhibition at the Royal Academy.

After a series of rooms packed with often deeply disturbing images, the show culminated in one devoted entirely to the remix. More precisely, the pictures were remixes by Baselitz of his earlier works, which created a powerful double resonance. The ultimate remix, perhaps.

Ouch!

That has got to hurt. (Via Salon.)

Certifiably...Open

Here's a slightly different approach to encouraging openness:

Today sees the launch of the trial period for Certified Open, a programme to evaluate the technical and commercial lock-in of ICT solutions. Certified Open promotes fair and effective competition in the delivery of software, hardware and services.

...

Graham Taylor, Director of OpenForum Europe said: "Certified Open represents a complete solution for public and private sector users to check the openness of their ICT solutions. We frequently see examples where organisations have become locked-in to a system due to the costs involved in change. Analysis carried out by OFE has indicated that 90% of public sector organisations no longer have the freedom to choose ICT solutions on the basis of competitiveness, functionality or price because of lock-in.

Certified Open is designed to ensure freedom from lock-in and openness to fair competition. The framework assesses dependence on proprietary or undocumented protocols, dependence on undocumented or proprietary data formats, licensing terms that preclude the use of alternative products, extensions to standards to ensure good performance and the use of pseudo-standards dependent on patents or other restrictions that prevent compatible competing implementations."

Certified, indeed.

Everything You Wanted to Know About the GPLv3...

...but were afraid to ask in case it made plain your inability to grok the legalistic subtleties. Though hardly an idiot's guide to the version 3 of the GNU GPL, this Quick Guide to GPLv3 from the FSF itself is certainly very welcome.

Groklaw Interviews Becky Hogge

A couple of days ago I mentioned two key players in the fight to get the BBC to do the right thing over its downloads service. Groklaw has put up an extremely detailed discussion with one of them, Becky Hogge, capo dei capi at the Open Rights Group, about what's a stake. Well worth a read if you want to understand the issues.

Digg, Dugg, Dugg

The perils of being Dugg:

At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:

1. The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
2. we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
3. these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.

Perhaps they should give would-be downloaders a little coding test before giving them access to ensure that they are *really* serious hackers.... (Via Linux Journal.)

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.