Poland: Not Just Plumbers

In the UK the Polish plumber has become a staple figure of merriment, if not fun (after all, nobody wants to make fun of someone as important as a plumber.) More generally, there are supposed to be around 600,000 recent Polish immigrants, more or less keeping the UK economy going. (As a corollary, the number of signs and job vacancies in Polish is also shooting up.)

Now it seems that Polish programmers are just as important globally:

Recently, I moderated an interesting panel held at Stanford university at the Hoover Insititution, on the subject of Poland's growing role in the global tech community. Over the past few years Dell, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Siemens, and others have opened engineering offices in Poland.

Internalising Externalities

One of the problems with most everyday economics is that pollution tends to be regarded as an externality:

An externality occurs when a decision causes costs or benefits to third party stakeholders, often, although not necessarily, from the use of a public good. In other words, the participants in an economic transaction do not necessarily bear all of the costs or reap all of the benefits of the transaction. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on others when making use of public air.

But externalities have a habit of coming home to roost:

China's rising energy demand isn't just leaving its mark on the country's heritage. Every 30 seconds, an infant with birth defects is born in China, according to Jiang Fan, deputy head of the country's National Population and Family Planning Commission. The rate of birth defects nationwide has soared 40 percent in the past five years, from 105 defects per 10,000 births in 2001 to nearly 146 in 2006. The problem now affects nearly 1 in 10 Chinese families, the Commission stated in a recent report .

Birth defect rates are highest in the northern province of Shanxi, an area that is also home to some of China's richest coal resources. "The incidence of birth defects is related to environmental pollution," An Huanxiao, director of Shanxi's provincial family planning agency, told Xinhua News. "The survey's statistics show that birth defects in Shanxi's eight large coal-mining regions are far above the national average."

Tragedy and Travesty of the Commons

One of the key features of digital commons - like free software or science - is that there is no tragedy in the classical sense: it is impossible for users to "overgraze" a digital commons in the way they can a physical one.

That analogue tragedy can even by caused by the selfish actions of just one player. A case in point is the cetacean commons, which a few decades ago came perilously close to the ultimate tragedy: total destruction. That, happily, was avoided, but there are still a few benighted groups who insist on taking for themselves what belongs to all.

Worse, that selfishness is escalating:

A Japanese whaling fleet has set sail aiming to harpoon humpback whales for the first time in decades.

The fleet is conducting its largest hunt in the South Pacific - it has instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks.

This extraordinary display of contempt for the global community is compounded by a further insult. The "justification" for this pointless slaughter is given as:

killing whales allowed marine biologists to study their internal organs

What, you mean to find out if they have a brain, unlike the whalers who insist on hunting endangered species back to the brink of extinction?

Not so much a tragedy of the science commons as a travesty.

Some is Rotten in the State of Copyright

Nicely put:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Creative Commons Discovers Dual Licensing

I missed this before:

This is the CC+ project. An artist, for example, can release her work under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license, but then, using the CC+ infrastructure, enable those who want commercial rights (or anything else beyond the freedoms granted in the license) to link to a site that can provide those other rights. In this way, CC now helps support a hybrid economy of creativity. We provide a simple platform to protect and enable those who want to share; and we’ve built a simple way to cross over from that sharing economy for those who want to profit from their creativity.

Er, yes, this is called dual licensing in the open source world....

Modular Books

Modularisation is one of the key elements of open processes: so why can't we have modular books? Well, we can, up to a point:

On Wednesday, the Arizona community college announced a partnership with Pearson Custom Publishing to allow Rio Salado professors to piece together single individualized textbooks from multiple sources. The result, in what could be the first institution-wide initiative of its kind, will be a savings to students of up to 50 percent, the college estimates, as well as a savings of time to faculty, who often find themselves revising course materials to keep pace with continuously updated editions.

However, this is only with texts from one source: imagine if you could do this with *any* text. (Via if:book.)

Carmen, the Blog

Further proof, if any were needed, that blogs have entered the mainstream:

When the curtain falls on the final performance of English National Opera’s Carmen on Friday it will also end a groundbreaking experiment in connecting artists with their audience.

The production, staged by the film director Sally Potter, has been a commercial hit but was mauled by the critics, who called it “woefully tedious”, “an ugly, misbegotten aberration” and “a suicide note to the Arts Council”.

However, through a series of blogs written by members of the cast and crew, including Potter, the ENO believes it defused some of the power of the reviews by reaching out to the paying public.

A Second Chance for Second Life

I haven't been using Second Life much recently, but I wasn't sure why. Now I know. I've just tried the WindLight First Look Viewer, and its atmospheric effects - sunsets, clouds, water etc. - really transform the Second Life experience.

The problem before, I now see, was that Second Life was just too lacking in visual richness. With the WindLight First Look Viewer, Second Life is closer to real life in the sense that you can now just be, and watch the world go by. Time to give Second Life a second chance, perhaps.

Spreading the News About SpreadFirefox 2.0

One of the most innovative and successful aspects of Firefox has been its distributed marketing approach centred on the SpreadFirefox site. This has had a facelift, and is now full of bold reds, oranges and, er, reds. I expect I'll get used to it. (Via Linux and Open Source blog.)

Systematising Systems Management

Last year I wrote a review of the open source systems management sector. At that time, it was highly fragmented, symptomatic of the very early days of this area. The market is still fragmented, but there are some clear tectonic movements going on that hint at important consolidations to come.

First we had Hyperic cosying up to Red Hat:

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that they have extended their agreement to collaborate on the development of a common systems management platform. Development will continue under an open source model.

For years, the JBoss Operations Network team has been developing code on the Hyperic platform. Red Hat will be contributing its updates and enhancements to this new open source project. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project. Additionally, Hyperic and Red Hat will work jointly to include this base in both future Hyperic and Red Hat systems management products.

Now we have Nagios Enterprises and GroundWork getting luvvy-duvvy:

Nagios Enterprises (www.nagios.com), the commercial arm of Nagios, the world’s most popular open source host, service and network monitoring program, and GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT management software, today announced a joint partnership focused on joint market development and shared delivery of services around open source IT monitoring and management.

...

Under the terms of the joint partnership, Nagios Enterprises will soon offer tier three support for Nagios-related aspects of Groundwork Open Source. In addition, GroundWork Open Source and Nagios Enterprises will engage in various market development activities including cross-promotion via advertising, joint marketing efforts, and business referral opportunities.

It's not really clear how all this going to pan out, but it's seems likely that there will only be one or two main players left in a year or two. My bet is that Red Hat will simply buy up all the companies it needs. As Matthew Aslett pointed out recently, Red Hat is pretty voracious when it comes to swallowing other open source companies.

And whatever happens, I do wonder where this leaves the rather, er, quiescent Open Management Consortium, whose blog last had a posting on 21 May of this year....

Proprietary Software Does Not Scale

It used to be said that open source software does not scale - a reflection of both its immaturity at the time, and of the pious hopes of the proprietary world. Today, the reverse is true: it is proprietary software that does not scale, but in a slightly different sense.

This was brought home to me by IBM's fashionable Blue Cloud announcement:

Blue Cloud – based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure -- will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.

The whole point about cloud computing is that it has to be effectively infinite - the more people want, the more they get. You can't do that with software that requires some kind of licensing payment, unless it's flat-fee. You either have to write the software yourself, or - much easier - you use free software (or, as with Google and now IBM, you do both.)

If cloud computing takes off, Microsoft is going to be faced with a difficult choice: see everyone migrate to open source, or offer its operating systems for a flat fee. Given its recent behaviour in places like China and Russia, where it has effectively given away its software just to stop open source, I think it will opt for the latter.

Lecture Search Engine

Given the centrality of search to the way we use the Internet, it's surprising that we're still stuck with a few file-types - essentially text, with a few tags for images and video thrown in if you're lucky. I've written before about picture searching, and now here's lecture searching:

The Lecture Browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine. If any results look relevant, you can play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript.

Even better, the lectures this is indexing are from MIT's OpenCourseWare:

More than 200 MIT lectures are currently available on the site (web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/). So far, most of the users are international students who access the lectures through MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which makes curriculum materials for most MIT courses available to anyone with Internet access. Although the lecture-browsing system is still in the early development stages, a recent announcement in OCW's newsletter has drawn increased traffic to the site.

Barzilay and Glass expect the system will be most useful for OCW users and for MIT students who want to review lecture material. MIT World, a web site that provides video of significant MIT events such as lectures by speakers from MIT and around the world, is also participating in the project.

(Via Open Access News.)

Yummy Yamli

Although my Arabic is, shall we say, jejune, there have been rare occasions when I've wanted to search for Arabic words in Arabic script. Now I can, thanks to the clever Yamli site:

Yamli allows you to type Arabic using roman characters. For example you can enter the roman letter "f" for "ف". You can also use the Arabic chat characters. For example "3" for "ع", "2" for "ء", "7" for "ح", etc ...

Type it the way you say it. Try it out !

Couldn't be simpler. Now I just have to learn a few thousand Arabic words and I'm away. (Via The Inquirer.)

W(h)ither Blogging?

Here's a thoughtful post:

Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn't that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we'll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.

I find this particularly interesting because my impression is exactly the reverse: I find more and more interesting stuff in my feeds. Not only that, but I find this humble little blog is also attracting more attention, particularly among the PR crowd. I've noticed a distinct change in attitude among the latter - unspoken, but clearly there - from regarding blogs as vaguely interesting but not very influential, to seeing them as just as important as traditional media.

I'd go further: the blogs seem to be taking over. At a time when more and more (dead-tree) newspapers and magazines are closing down, or going purely online, and when more and more online titles are starting to run bloggers as part of the mix, it seems to me that the barycentre of digital publishing is mostly certainly moving deep into the heart of the blogosphere.

Of course, the acid test will be during the next downturn, but I'm optimistic. Unlike the publishing excesses of dotcom 1.0, where magazines blossomed with the manic marketing of no-hoper startups, only to wilt themselves when that, er, fertiliser dried up, blogs are predicated on lean and mean. The only ones that will suffer seriously are those that are beginning to bloat towards the condition of traditional, inefficient publications. No names, no packdrill.

Sony Reads the e-Leaves

I have to admit that I hate Sony computers. I bought a Vaio portable once, and it was awful in just about every respect - overpriced, weird backup discs, and a battery that soon died on me, with no sensibly-priced option of getting a replacement. So I don't come with many positive feelings towards its new e-book device, the PRS-505. But apparently it does a couple of things right:

the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype

There again, you'd be mad not to use GNU/Linux on a system like this. Now all Sony needs to do is reduce the price by a factor of about ten and I might be vaguely interested.

Or maybe not.

Mobilising Tim Berners-Lee

Tim on mobile openness:

On the opening day of Mobile Internet World in Boston, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web told a packed hall that the mobile Internet needs to be fully and completely the Internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards.

“The Web is an open platform on which you build other things,” he said. “That’s how you get this innovation. The Web is universal: you can run it on any hardware, on any operating system, it can be used by people of different languages…It’s a sandbox where people can [play and] exercise their creativity. It’s very important to keep the Web universal as we merge the Internet with mobile.”

From Rebel Code to Codi Rebel

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for: Rebel Code....in Catalan:

Una història apassionant que ens explica com un grup d'inconformistes desafià les grans empreses i va produir una revolució inesperada en el món dels ordinadors. En 1991 un jove estudiant, Linus Torvalds, va comprar un ordinador personal i es va plantejar l'elaboració d'un nou programari. Tot va començar gairebé com un joc, com un hobby, però en pocs anys, i amb l'ajuda d'un grup d'amics i col·laboradors connectats a través de la xarxa, Torvalds desenvolupà un sistema operatiu que esdevingué un veritable repte per a Microsoft. El programari GNU/Linux és utilitzat avui per milions de persones. I la qüestió que més desassossec provoca entre els grans gegants de la informàtica és que el seu ús és lliure, no costa diners. En aquest relat ple d'anècdotes i d'històries reveladores, Glyn Moody exposa de manera clara i accessible com es va desenvolupar aquesta lluita entre David i Goliat protagonitzada per Linux, bo i situant-la en el context més ampli de la història del moviment en favor del programari lliure. Alhora mostra tot el que es pot aconseguir quan la creativitat i la cooperació intel·lectual es posen per damunt del simple benefici econòmic. Glyn Moody s'ha ocupat de Linux gairebé des del moment de la seua elaboració.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Update: A here's a word from the translators.

Adding Some Lustre to Supercomputing

Everybody knows that GNU/Linux absolutely dominates the top 500 supercomputing listings: in the latest survey it notches up an 85% share (Windows manages 1.2%). Less well-known - to me, at least - is the fact that Lustre, an open source cluster file system, also does well:

Lustre highlights include:

The #1 fastest supercomputer in the world.

Lustre is being used on 7 out of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Out of the top 30 fastest supercomputers in the world - Lustre can be found on 16 of them.

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.)