MPAA: The Biter Bit

Although I am a frequent critic of the more outrageous excesses of copyright, I don't deny it has its place, in moderation. For example, this blog is licensed thanks to copyright, and the whole of the GNU GPL is based on it. So it seems only right that the free software world should be able to avail itself of the really horrible DMCA to slap down violations of the GPL:

The MPAA's "University Toolkit" (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students' communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations. The Toolkit is based on the GPL-licensed Xubuntu operating system (a flavor of Linux). The GPL requires anyone who makes a program based on GPL'ed code has to release the source code for their program and license it under the GPL. The MPAA refused multiple requests to provide the sources for their spyware, so an Ubuntu developer sent a DMCA notice to the MPAA's ISP and demanded that the material be taken down as infringing.

A hit, a palpable hit.

What's also deeply ironic is that the MPAA choose to use Xubuntu in the first place, rather than intellectual monopoly-friendly Windows. When even your brothers-in-shame shun you, you know you've got problems.

Perens Goes Peripatetic

Bruce Perens has achieved the remarkable feat of being one of the leading figures in the open source world without ever becoming a fixture anywhere for very long. Apparently, he's off again:

I have left Sourcelabs, and am planning another start-up. Stanley is in 2nd grade now, which leaves me with time to be a CEO again.

It will be interesting to see where he lands.

Eben on Software Ecology

Eben Moglen is probably the most fluent and engaging speaker it has ever been my privilege to interview; proof of his enduring appeal can be found in the fact that I don't get tired reading yet more interviews with him, like this one, which includes the following suggestive passage:

One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable, natural resource. You can treat software like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere. We package them for your advantage, things you didn't have to make because you were given them by the bounty of nature.

And this one, too:

If you've become dependent on a commons, for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don't strip mine the forest, you don't fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea and you don't want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected. What I do is to train forest rangers ... to work in a forest that some people love because it's free and other people love because it produces great trees cheaply. But both sides want the forest to exist pristine and undesecrated by greedy behavior by anybody else. Nobody wants to see the thing burn down for one group's profit. Everybody needs it. So whether you are IBM, which has one strategy about the commoditization of software, or you're Hewlett-Packard, which has another, whatever your particular relationship to that reality is, everybody's beginning to get it. In the 21st century economy, it isn't factories and it isn't people that make things -- it's communities.

The beauty of all this analysis is that the ideas flow both ways: if free software is a commons like the forests or the seas, then it follows that the forest and the seas share many characteristics of free software. Which is why you read about them all the time on this blog. (Via Linux Today.)

Slaying the Author-Side Fees Dragon

There is some long-living FUD abroad in the open access world: that the only way OA journals work is by charging authors - the "author-side fees" model. It exists, to be sure, but is far less widespread than many believe. And the reason for the longevity of that FUD is not hard to find: it serves the purposes of the traditional science publishers well, by frightening people with the prospect of paying to publish, rather than paying to read.

But the time has come to slay this particular dragon:

Now, can we please put to rest the myth/FUD/whatever that there is only one OA model, the author-side fees/PLoS model? While we're at it, let's have a few more closely related ideas go the way of the dodo: that OA journals discriminate against indigent authors (because they charge publication fees -- except that most of them don't); that OA journals will compromise on quality (in order to collect payment for manuscripts -- except that most of them don't); that if most journals went OA, universities would have to pay more in author-side fees (which, remember, most OA journals don't, but most non-OA journals do, charge) than they do now in subscription fees.

See also Peter Suber's earlier commentary on the same issue.

Stallman's Symbolic Victory

Slashdot points to an interesting list of first 100 registered domains. But I doubt whether even the most deep-dyed supporter of free software realises that it was the company behind the very first domain - Symbolics.com - that ultimately led to Richard Stallman to start his GNU project.

Symbolics was in competition with a company called LMI - Lisp Machine Incorporated - set up by a friend of Stallman. As its name implies, it was in the business of making computers running the Lisp programming language, as was Symbolics.

Unfortunately, Symbolics had most of the top LISP programmers, having recruited all Stallman's fellow hackers at MIT's AI Lab, and thereby destroying its community. All, that is, apart from Stallman, who set about single-handedly matching the work of Symbolics and its entire team of coders. This is what he told me for my book Rebel Code in 1999:

Looking back, Stallman says that this period beginning March 1982 saw "absolutely" the most intense coding he had ever done; it probably represents one of the most sustained bouts of one-person programming in history.

"In some ways it was very comfortable because I was doing almost nothing else," he says, "and I would go to sleep whenever I felt sleepy; when I woke up I would go back to coding; and when I felt sleepy again I'd go to sleep again. I had nothing like a daily schedule. I'd sleep probably for a few hours one and a half times a day, and it was wonderful; I felt more awake than I've ever felt. And I got a tremendous amount of work done [and] I did it tremendously efficiently." Although "it was exhilarating sometimes, sometimes it was terribly wearying. It was in some ways terribly lonesome, but I kept doing it [and] I wouldn't let anything stop me," he says."

His eventual failure to match Symbolics' work, which included a completely new system, proved a blessing disguise:

"I decided I didn't want to just continue punishing Symbolics forever. They destroyed my community; now I [wanted] to build something to replace it," he says. "I decided I would develop a free operating system, and in this way lay the foundation for a new community like the one that had been wiped out."

The rest, as they say, is history.

Will Microsoft Ever Learn This Trick Doesn't Work?

When you read this:

Perhaps more important than the overall numbers is the positive impact IE7 has made for our users. As you know, we focused a lot on improving security in IE7. We believe IE 7 is the safest Microsoft browser released to date. According to a vulnerability report published today, IE7 has fewer vulnerabilities than previous versions of IE over the same time period. What’s more, the report showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.

...you might not notice that the "vulnerability report" published at the imposing-sounding CSO site is written by a certain Jeff Jones, who, by an amazing coincidence:

is a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group.

So, Microsoft refers to a report that just happens to be written by one of its employees, but without mentioning that fact. Amazing how these things can just slip the mind, eh? (Via Mike Shaver.)

A Question of Open Chemistry

I've written about open science and open notebook science before, but here's an excellent round-up of open chemistry:

The next generation of professional chemists are far more likely to be in tune with web-based chemistry, treating blogs and social networking sites as professional tools in the same manner as email. For Open Chemistry advocates, the inevitable passage of time may be enough to usher in their revolution.

(Via Open Access News.)

Don't Steal This Book, Michael

The Kindle is a breakthrough device, in many ways analogous to the first iPod. Just as the iPod brought MP3 players to the masses, the Kindle will be the device that introduces ebooks to many people.

And while Apple sells lots of songs legally on iTunes, the vast majority of content on most iPods comes from home-ripped CDs or was obtained in violation of copyright laws. I expect the same thing with the Kindle. Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read.

Sorry, Michael, violating copyright laws is very different from "stealing", as you should know. Moreover, "home-ripped CDs" are not even violations of copyright laws in many jurisdictions (and shouldn't be in any, since it's clearly a fair use/fair dealing.) Confusing these facts simply plays into the hands of the copyright bullies.

Wikipedia Pays the Price

News that Wikipedia is to start paying illustrators might come as a shock to some:

The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages — just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The payments are made possible by a $20,000 donation from Philip Greenspun, who said he was moved to give the money because of his experience seeing technical books he had originally published online appear in print.

“In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’ main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”

In fact, this is entirely in keeping with the open source model, where it is well established that hackers do the big, interesting bits for love, but you must pay for the tiny boring bits if you want the job finished. Indeed, this forms an important part of the service offered by open source companies, whose job is essentially rounding out the free offerings.

Good News out of Africa

Talking of trees, and preserving them, here's some unwonted good news from a country that sadly seems not to be awash in it:

The Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) joins the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in announcing the creation of the new Sankuru Nature Reserve, a huge rainforest area harboring the endangered bonobo, a great ape most closely related to humans. Larger than the state of Massachusetts, the new reserve encompasses 11,803 square miles of tropical rainforest, extremely rich in biodiversity.

Trees and bonobos? What more do you want? Indeed, I felt compelled to rush off and give my widow's mite on the spot. You might like to do the same.

The Joy of Ratchetlessness

Irrespective of the relative merits of free and proprietary software, there is one aspect where free software wins hands down. Proprietary software is based on the ratchet principle: once you start using it, you are eventually forced to move up through the upgrades; free software has no such compulsion. This ratchet is bad enough for people using legitimate copies of proprietary software, but for those using unlicensed versions, it's even worse:

"At first when Microsoft officers visited us, they convinced us on the importance of operating on genuine software which we didn't object to, but the manner they are doing it cannot let us sustain our businesses," he said.

His dilemma started when Microsoft sent him a letter stating that they would want him to legalise his operating system. However , he says that his business is operating on Windows 2000, but then Microsoft asked them to upgrade to Windows XP. "After testing the Windows XP, we found that it was not suitable for us but they insisted that we must go that way," he claimed.

He welcomed legalising software on Windows 2000, to which Microsoft says they did not want to license what they don't support.

So what did this chap do? Yup:

he embraced Open Source. "At first I was hesitant but with what am experiencing, I wish I had gone Open Source long time ago. It did not cost me anything. I closed for two days and installed all the machines with the Open Source software" he says.

In this respect, proprietary software is a victim of its own business model - it simply must get more money out of forced upgrades. Free software, of course, can offer upgrades for free or even - revolutionary thought - simply let people use old software, and find support from like-minded people online. (Via FSDaily.)

Why I (Heart) Trees

I've expressed my undying love for trees before, particularly as a way of preserving our atmospheric commons, but I had no idea that they were this good:

'Every year, the expanding European forests remove a surprisingly large amount of carbon from the atmosphere,' the study's co-author Aapo Rautiainen stresses. 'According to rough estimates, their impact in reducing atmospheric carbon may well be twice that achieved by the use of renewable energy in Europe today.'

So what's the obvious lesson to learn from this? Why, that they should be included in calculations of carbon sinks - and that countries who plant more trees/don't cut down the ones they have should be rewarded in terms of carbon credits:

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries currently do not get emission credits for increasing natural carbon sinks through forestry and agriculture. The Finnish researcher's suggest, however, that this might be a helpful tool. 'Policies that accelerate the expansion of our forest biomass not only represent a win-win for climate change and biodiversity, they also open up economic opportunities,' states Laura Saikku, the third author of the study. 'Land owners can benefit with new industries like forest-based bio-energy production. This could also help to reduce one of the main threats to sustained forest expansion - the need to open land to produce agricultural biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels.'

Obvious, really.

Closing the Open Content Schism

Nowadays we are used to content being released under a Creative Commons licence, which has become the kind of de facto free licence for content. So it's rather curious that the biggest free content project of them all - Wikipedia - does not use such licences, but one from the FSF. The explanation is simple: at the time that Wikipedia got going, the only licence that was practical was the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

Hitherto, it's been impossible to reconcile these two, but that looks like it might finally be changing:

It is hereby resolved that:

* The [Wikimedia] Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
* Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

Badgeware Comes in from the Cold

Has badgeware - software whose licences requires attribution to be displayed in all copies - gone legit? Roberto Galoppini seems to think so:

Badgeware is not only OSI approved, but it is also endorsed by the Free Software Foundation now, with its flagship license. The debate is over.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Just as the Budapest Open Access initiative was a defining moment for open access, so the Cape Town Open Education Declaration promises to be the same for open education:

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

The expanding global collection of open educational resources has created fertile ground for this effort. These resources include openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning. They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.

"The freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint": does that sound familiar, Richard? Now all we need are some good open education licences.... (Via Open Access News.)

The Virtues of PatientOS

It used to be a truism that the open source development methodology would only work for mainstream projects. Only for areas of interest to large user and hacker populations, so the logic went, could support the free software ecology. So a striking proof of the growing maturity of open source is its increasing appearance in vertical markets, hitherto regarded as unviable.

For example, here's the GPL'd PatientOS:

PatientOS is a free clinical information management system for hospitals and healthcare practitioners. Pharmacy, the laboratory, registration and other departments will be able to automate many processes when version 1.0 is released October 31st, 2008. A physician practice version will be released March 31st, 2008.

Pretty specialist - and pretty important, too. (Via FSDaily.)

Trumping Intellectual Monopolies

Some misguided people seem to think that intellectual monopolies are "sacred" - probably because they insist on calling them "intellectual property", and property, as we all know, is totally sancrosant. But it seems that some are realising there may be higher imperatives - like saving the planet:

Intellectual property rules should be reshaped to ensure that they do not hinder developing countries from gaining access to technology considered vital for addressing climate change, the European Parliament has declared.

Members of the Parliament (MEPs) on 29 November approved a report that urges examination of the possibility of revising the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS may need to be amended, the report suggests, in order to allow for the compulsory licensing of environmentally-friendly technology that is patented.

Amending TRIPS? Now there's an interesting idea.

Grizzly Bears with Chainsaws for Hands

That's the creators of the Internet, in case you were wondering. (Via Boing Boing.)

Giving "Eye-Pea" the Heave-Ho

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not over-enamoured of the term "intellectual property", and feel the need to protect myself from its malign influence by placing prophylactic inverted commas around it. Those readers will also know what I think we should use instead, but here's the full half-hour argument why, with the added bonus that you get to see me insulted by an "eye-pea" enthusiast.

Where Are With Open Source in Europe?

Given its non-standard nature, free software is particularly hard to pin down in terms of the bare facts about its development and deployment. But this post from Roberto Galoppini does a useful job of pulling together linnks to various stories and studies about open source in Europe that provide a few pointers.

Textbook Enterprise Open Source

There's no more powerful argument in favour of using GNU/Linux in an enterprise context than big names that are already doing so. Google and Amazon are the obvious ones, but we can now add PayPal to the list:

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.

The article also gives some very concrete advantages of running a GNU/Linux-based grid in this way:

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel (NSDQ: INTC)-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal's 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal's needs faster because they're working in the target environment. That's harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.

European Digital Library - An Update

I've written about this project several times; here's the latest info:

Europe's cultural institutions plan to launch a prototype of the European digital library in November 2008. It will give direct access to at least 2 million digital books, photographs, maps, archival records, and film material from Europe's libraries, archives and museums. By 2010 this will already have rapidly grown to include far more digital objects than the 6 million originally envisaged as more institutions make their digitised assets searchable through the European digital library.

For a steady growth of the European digital library, two key issues need to be tackled: the financing of digitisation and solutions for making copyrighted works searchable through the European digital library. In its yesterday's meeting the high level group discussed:

* new ways for funding digitisation through public private partnerships;
* solutions for mass-digitisation of out of print works and orphan works (for which it is very difficult to locate the rightholders). By June next year the group should find an agreement on dealing with orphan works (including criteria for searching for rightholders);
* the issue of access to and preservation of scientific information (see IP/07/190). Scientific publishers, libraries and scientists confirmed their intention to work together in an experiment with open access to scientific publications after an embargo period.

It's particuarly pleasing to see orphan works mentioned, since bringing them online would make a huge difference. It's also good to see scientific publishers making positive noises - though we'll need to see the details. (Via paidContent:UK.)

Firefox By Numbers

* We think there are at least 125,000,000 Firefox users in the world right now, give or take. That represents a doubling since Firefox 2 was released a little over a year ago, and significant growth in every country.
* At Mozilla we view market share as an important quantitative metric that can help us ask smarter questions and build better products, but it’s only one of many
* We have systems here that tell us approximate number of daily users, and use that information to inform much of what we do.

The rest of this interesting post from John Lilly, COO of Mozilla, explains the reasoning behind that number, and also offers some insight into what the Mozilla team are thinking these days. (Via Asa Dotzler.)

Mashup 2.0: Inheriting the Mesh

I've written before about how mashups need meshes. Typically that mesh will be geographical, but another obvious one is time. Time is interesting because it's often linked to people's lives - or rather several interlinked lives. That's the insight behind this new startup, AllofMe:

Founder Addy Feuerstein has described AllofMe in the following way:

“The idea is that if I or someone else has a picture that includes my son, alone or with friends, I or anyone else will be able to tag the people in the picture and transform these digital assets into part of my sons. When he grows up and takes control over his own timeline, he will have a timeline of tagged material from his childhood…We will also transform the timeline created by each person into a video movie, through a widget on an internet site [and] enable comparison of your timeline with that of your acquaintances, or chronological data files. For instance, you will be able to compare your own timeline with historical events of Time, and see where you were when some important world event occurred.”

I'm not sure about the company, but I think the idea is important, because it hints at a further key property of Mashup 2.0, where it becomes possible to use pre-existing meshes in richer ways.

Asus Eee Goes Weeeeeee!

Good news for Asus, but also for GNU/Linux:

Unprecedented demand for the low-cost baby laptop from both consumers and the education sector sees PC builder increase sales target to five million units for 2008 as UK retailers struggle to keep stock on shelves.

Asustek (also known as Asus) has revised its expectations for sales of its recently launched Eee PC low cost laptop, increasing sales forecast from three million units to five million.

For more analysis see my comments quoted here.