Opening Up the Source Code of Society

Carl Malamud has done it again:

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

Great news (well, mostly for Americans, but a legal commons is a legal commons). And how about this for an quotation:

“The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register,” said Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org. “Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.”

(Via Lessig Blog.)

Sun Eyes Up GNU/Linux's Jugular

In the nicest possible way, of course:

Dell and Sun Microsystems are set to announce that Sun's Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems will be supported in all of Dell's servers.

Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz plan to make the announcement during a joint appearance at the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 conference here today.

The agreement means that customers buying a Dell rack or blade server is ordered will get the option of installing Solaris or OpenSolaris. Customers picking one of these operating systems will get support from Sun's online support organization through Dell, making the experience seamless for the customer.

So while getting Dell to put GNU/Linux on its desktop machines has been the obsession of certain fanboys (oh, that would be me), that cunning Mr Schwartz has snuck up on the server side. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

Yahoo! Goes Whoop! About Hadoop! (and Pig!)

Now why on earth would Yahoo be doing this?

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced that it will be the first in the industry to launch an open source program aimed at advancing the research and development of systems software for distributed computing. Yahoo!'s program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo!. Unlike other companies and traditional supercomputing centers, which focus on providing users with computers for running applications and for coursework, Yahoo!'s program focuses on pushing the boundaries of large-scale systems software research.

Currently, academic researchers lack the hardware and software infrastructure to support Internet-scale systems software research. To date, Yahoo! has been the primary contributor to Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Hadoop has been adopted by many groups and is the software of choice for supporting university coursework in Internet-scale computing. Researchers have been eager to collaborate with Yahoo! and tap the company's technical leadership in Hadoop-related systems software research and development.

As a key part of the program, Yahoo! intends to make Hadoop available in a supercomputing-class data center to the academic community for systems software research. Called the M45, Yahoo!'s supercomputing cluster, named after one of the best known open star clusters, has approximately 4,000 processors, three terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second (27 teraflops), placing it among the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.

M45 is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, Yahoo!-supported, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research, the central advanced research organization of Yahoo! Inc.

It's cool that Yahoo's backing the open source Hadoop, and doubly cool that one of the projects is called Pig. But it's also shrewd. It's becoming abundantly clear that open beats closed; Google, for all its use of open source software, is remarkably closed at its core. Enter Hadoop, running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo, with the real possibility of spawning a truly open rival to Google.... (Via Matt Asay.)

Facebook Goes Corporate

Here's an important straw in the wind:

Content-oriented Facebook Applications may now easily be developed using the Alfresco platform. This means that enterprise content management capabilities can be mixed with the social graph of Facebook.

The first of many.

Flickr: Happy Two Billionth!

Flickr has reached its two billionth picture: and that's just the beginning....

Documentum Opens Up (Not)

Hm, not my idea of opening up:

EMC is inviting independent software vendors, system integrators and channel partners to help develop, integrate and sell new content/ records management products and related professional services for specific vertical markets in the mid-market based on its Documentum 6 platform.

But mark my words, it will do, but probably too late, once the open source enterprise content management systems have completely redefined the market.

The University of Openess (sic)

New one on me:

The University of Openess is a self-institution for independent research, collaboration and learning. Find out more about the courses, campuses and student/teacher life at the uo in the AboutUo section.

(Via if:book.)

From Gizmo Manuals to Gitmo Manuals

Nobody reads the manual, right? Well, here's one that people probably will want to read on the fine Wikileaks site: it's for Guantánamo Bay....

Isn't openness a wonderful thing?

The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting -- since October 2003 -- a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document.

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....