Novell's One Big Thing

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux-Powered Toasters?

Well, not quite, but here's a Linux-powered picture frame:

Sagem Communications and Freescale Semiconductor today announced the deployment of the new AgfaPhoto AF5080W digital photoframe, the latest product from their broad collaboration based on Freescale’s i.MX multimedia processors and Linux multimedia applications.

(Via Linux and Open Source blog.)

Wackypedia: the Wikipedia fork

On Linux Journal.

The Real Big Switch

An eloquent statement by John Wilbanks about the commons, sharing and solving complex problems:

One of the reasons I believe so deeply in the commons approach (by which i mean: contractually constructed regimes that tilt the field towards sharing and reuse, technological enablements that make public knowledge easy to find and use, and default policy rules that create incentives to share and reuse) is that I think it is one of the only non-miraculous ways to defeat complexity. If we can get more people working on individual issues – which are each alone not so complex – and the outputs of research snap together, and smart people can work on the compiled output as well – then it stands to reason that the odds of meaningful discoveries increase in spite of overall systemic complexity.

He concludes:

It is not easy. But it is, in a way, a very simple change. It just requires the flipping of a switch, from a default rule of “sharing doesn’t matter” to one of “sharing matters enormously”.

That's what it's all about, people.

Mark My Words

On Open Enterprise blog.

OBOOE Makes a Noise about Open Source

On Open Enterprise blog.

De-Commodifying an Enclosed Commons

Confused? You will be:

in today’s world, the crush of branded meanings has become overwhelming. The cultural space is too cluttered with signifiers, and words are losing their credibility. And marketing itself is so ubiquitous that it is difficult for a super-elite establishment to convey that it is “above it all” -- grandly indifferent to the market. Clearly the next step is to de-commodify the product or service that was sold in the market, and previously belonged to the commons, and make it a proprietary gift! Ah, now that’s really luxury!

EU vs. MS 2.0?

The European Commission opened a new antitrust probe against Microsoft on Monday into whether it unfairly tied its Web browser to the Windows operating system and made it harder for rival software to work with Windows.

But the good news is:

"This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of an infringement. It only signifies that the Commission will further investigate the case as a matter of priority," the Commission said.

Oh, that's alright, then.

Gaining Focus

Focus is one of the two main German-language weekly news magazines (the other being Der Spiegel), so the announcement that it is opening up its full 15-year archive for free access is most welcome. Let's hope that Der Spiegel, err, mirrors the move.

Mozilla's Middle Kingdom Mess

Mozilla is a disaster in China:

With more than 160 million Internet users, China is the world's second-largest Net market and is likely to overtake the U.S. as No. 1 by the end of the decade. More than four-fifths of China's Internet users use IE to go online, mostly because it's bundled with the Windows operating system. Homegrown companies Maxthon—a private company based in Hong Kong—and Tencent —the Shenzhen-based operator of China's most popular instant messaging service—both have browsers based on IE kernels that are the second and third most commonly used in China.

Mozilla estimates there are 3.5 million regular Firefox users in China, giving it just 2% of the market. (According to June, 2007, figures by Onestat, Mozilla has a 19.65% market share in the U.S.) Mozilla has set a goal of grabbing a 5% market share in China "as quickly as possible," says Gong.

The problem?

In the West, Mozilla has been able to eat away at IE's market share by promoting Firefox as a free open-source software project. In China, the open-source movement is having a harder time gaining traction because of widespread software piracy. With pirated copies of Windows XP or Vista selling on the street for less than $2, there is little economic incentive for Chinese Internet users to download Firefox.

The solution?

Bill Xu, founder of the ZEUUX Free Software Community, a Beijing group that promotes open source, points out that for Firefox to succeed in China, it shouldn't compete on cost but by stressing its security features. "IE isn't very secure. It's plagued with a lot of add-ons, malware, and viruses. Firefox is more secure, and that's the main reason a lot of users choose it," he says.

Well, I think this may require some more creative thinking. It's not just a matter of saying "security", not least because Firefox has its own security problems, and it will be easy to defeat that tactic. Perhaps we need more Firefox plugins that serve the Chinese market, specific to the Chinese language, for example.

In any case, this is getting serious: failure to make inroads into the Chinese browser market undoes much of the good work in Europe, where Firefox is getting close to a majority share in some markets.

An Intellectual Approach to File Sharing

I've always assumed the Swedish Pirate Party were a bunch of anarchists who wanted to cock a snook at authority by disrupting one of its precious intellectual monopolies, and have some fun along the way.

I was wrong.

It turns out that there is some pretty deep thinking behind what they are doing, as evidence by this fascinating interview with Rick Falkvinge, founder and the leader of the party:

What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy - forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance - realized they were under a serious attack, and mounted every piece of defense they could muster. For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle.

And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.

So now we know what the enemy has, and that they have absolutely nothing in terms of intellectual capital to bring to the battle. They do, however, have their bedside connections with the current establishment. That's the major threat to us at this point.

Intellectual capital? Hm....

And then he goes on to make this important point:

The people who have been led to believe that file sharing can be stopped with minimal intrusion are basically smoking crack.

Early on in the debate, we dropped the economic arguments altogether and focused entirely on civil liberties and the right to privacy. This has proven to be a winning strategy, with my keynote "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties" being praised as groundbreaking.

The economic arguments are strong, but debatable. There are as many reports as there are interests in copyright, and every report arrives at a new conclusion. If you just shout and throw reports over the volleyball net at the other team, it becomes a matter of credibility of the reports. When you switch to arguing civil liberties, you dropkick that entire discussion.

Obviously I need to pay more attention to these people.

Has EMI Finally Heard the Music?

I'm not the biggest fan of private equity companies, but they do have the virtue of being ruthlessly logical: they are not enslaved by history, just by greed. That means they are not frightened of radical thinking or radical solutions if it brings them more of the foldable stuff. Thinking like this:

The record business - in which 85 per cent of artists are lossmaking and EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs - "is stuck with a model designed for a world that has changed and gone forever", he says.

His solution is to switch from pushing CDs to pulling consumers towards music in different forms. One element will be focus groups. "People say the music industry is more creative and the customer doesn't know, only the creatives do.

"When you look at which car companies are succeeding it's the ones which work with their customers. Are clothes not creative? Is fashion not creative? Is food not creative? The only real difference is these industries have learnt to work with the customer and not force-feed them," he argues.

So, he seems to get the idea of listening to customers, which is good.

Surprisingly, he says that Radiohead, the band that ditched EMI last year to launch their latest album online, made the right choice. "Radiohead had the right idea. They understand their fans. They realise some of them want the premium box set. I'm one who bought one, and paid the full price. What Radiohead showed the industry was that it isn't one answer for all artists or indeed for every customer."

Which indicates that he also realises what the record business is really about: selling scarce commodities like analogue objects and unique relationships.

ERC Goes Big on OA

Here's an impressively strong commitment to open access from the European Research Council:

The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.

Notice that's into repositories immediately, and full open access within six months. But what struck me particularly were two additional aspects.

The first was support for open data that's one of the strongest I've seen so far:

The ERC considers essential that primary data - which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data - are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication.

There was also a nice sting in the tail, too:

The ERC is keenly aware of the desirability to shorten the period between publication and open access beyond the currently accepted standard of 6 months.

Translated: you ain't seen nuffink yet.

Tweedledee, Meet Tweedledum

I've noted before that Microsoft and Elsevier are, well, shall we say, kindred spirits. As Peter Suber observes, they're going to be getting even chummier now that Microsoft is acquiring the search company FAST:

FAST is the search technology Elsevier uses in Scirus, Scopus, and ScienceDirect.

BECTA Late than Never

BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, starts to get it:

UK schools should not upgrade to Microsoft's Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has said in a report on the software. It is also supporting use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files.

...

"We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit," it said.

The cost of upgrading Britain's schools to Vista would be £175m, around a third of which would go to Microsoft, the agency said. The rest would go on deployment costs, testing and hardware upgrades, it said.

Even that sum would not be enough to purchase graphics cards capable of displaying Windows Aero Graphics, although that's no great loss because "there was no significant benefit to schools and colleges in running Aero," it said.

As for Office 2007, "there remains no compelling case for deployment," the agency said in its full report, published this week.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this ever-so gentle kneeing in the digital groin.

Hallelujah! An MP Who Groks IT

Many of the UK Government's fiascos - both old ones like the loss of 25 million bank details, or future ones like ID cards - could be avoided if there were people in office who understood IT. After all, the mistakes that are being made - allowing someone to download 25 million records and then send them through the post, or creating a centralised database of everyone's most personal details - aren't exactly subtle.

Alas, these people are rare, but one such is John Pugh, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southport. I've met him a few times, and always been impressed by his grasp of technical issues, and that is demonstrated once more in this letter to Mark Thompson, the BBC's Director-General, a copy of which has been passed on to me. It deals with the thorny matter of the iPlayer, and follows a meeting with Parliament's Public Accounts Committee:

It's worth quoting at length:

I do recognise that [the iPlayer] has an attractive interface,is user friendly and addresses digital rights issues so I stop short of suggesting the BBC has bought a lemon.

The more fundamental issue is its failure to apply open standards and be sufficiently interoperable to work fully (stream and download) on more than one platform. The BBC is funded by licence players not all of whom have or chose to use a computer running Windows XP or Vista. By guaranteeing full functionality to the products of one software vendor it is as a public body handing a commercial advantage to that company- effectively illegal state aid!
The aspiration to eventually ( you said within two years) remove this advantage- does not rebut this charge. A promise of amendment is never sufficient excuse for past sins or indeed much of an explanation.

Most major web based developments of any scale these days work on the presumption that interoperablity, open standards and platform neutrality are givens. It is not clear why the BBC design brief did not specify these requirements or if it did what technical problems-given the expertise available- hinder them being implemented.

So long as the I-Player is bundled in with Windows/Internet Explorer it continues runs the risk of breaching state aid rules - as the benefits it thereby bestows on Microsoft (with their somewhat blemished reputation for fair competition) come via the deployment of the public’s licence money. What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.

I recognise and welcome the assurances that the BBC and you personally have given on this subject but wonder whether the sheer novelty of the new media has blinded many to the clear commercial inequity in the delivery of it.

Now all we need to do is make sure that John becomes Prime Minister....

KOfficeSource Means Business

On Open Enterprise blog.

On The Value Of Things You Don't Own

Deep stuff this:

To my mind, the simple idea is that the skills required to operate within networked media are new because no one does - or can - own all the data. It's a bit like a library. You can't really own it because it's actually a system rather than a thing. However, you're very welcome to borrow stuff. And maybe if I recommend some good books and you share them with friends we can get together over coffee as a result. Then we have created a little group (aka social network) that can be valuable to us all and might become a big group. Or not. Alternatively, you can create your own library at home. And put a big lock on it to keep all the value in.

Very nice. (Via James Governor’s Monkchips.)

KDE 4 Goes Forth

Nice:

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all the user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

This free stuff just keeps getting better and better.

The Problems of the Public Domain

Here's an interesting exploration of the perils of putting your stuff into the public domain:

Countries with moral rights protections, the right of the artist to be attributed for their work among other elements, often make those rights inalienable, meaning they can not be given away under any circumstance.

Therefore, in these countries attribution rights still rest with the respective authors and these dedications are little more than a promise not to sue if those rights are infringed. That is a promise that can be revoked at any time.

Second, there are some theories that hold that putting a work in the public domain might be seen as a gift and not a legal agreement. If such a gift were found to be an “unenforceable promise”, it could be retracted at a later date.

Third, the posts themselves were not written by attorneys and are very informal in nature. Though Creative Commons has a public domain dedication system, they both chose not to use it. It remains to be seen how these dedications would hold up in court if ever they were challenged.

Finally, the dedications only extend to existing works. The authors reserve the right in the future to reserve some or all rights in newer works. This could be seen as a block on activities such as scraping that are ongoing and automatic.

So while the dedications certainly are intended to forfeit all copyright protections on their work, they do not do so completely because it is impossible to do so.

Copyright law resists the public domain and favors automatic protection. This frustrates many in the field, but it is the nature of the beast.

The whole post is quite long, but it's well worth a read for the interesting perspective it puts on the public domain. (Via P2P Foundation.)

UMPC from Lenovo, Low-Cost Box from Shuttle

And here's another ultra-mobile PC:

At Lenovo's press dinner the other night there was this unidentifiable handheld placed on display... it runs Linux and uses new 45-nanometer chips from Intel.

Update: And here's an ultra low-cost box from Shuttle:

its $199 KPC Linux PC

...

It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front.

The Saga of Erik

Saith he:

Finally, I wanted to address some stories that have been spread by a handful of individuals in the open source community. It is true that I worked at Microsoft for a long time and frankly speaking, I am proud of that. Right now, my loyalties are to the BBC and the BBC alone. I will only make decisions that are in the best interest of the licence fee payer. My actions will speak louder than my words...

Well, I look forward to that. But I do wonder how wide the purview will be when deciding what exactly is "in the best interest of the licence fee payer": defending fundamental principles of openness and neutrality, or just going for the cheapest deal in the short term? We shall see....

The IT Department in Cloud Cuckoo Land

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Shrinking Water Commons

Bad precedent:

Historically, the public trust doctrine has assured public access to the bodies of water within a state’s borders. This has usually meant the historic high-water mark for a lake or ocean. But in Ohio last month, a state judge issued a ruling that revises the definition of the public trust doctrine as it applies to the Lake Erie shoreline. The public no longer has access to the high-water mark, but only to the “water’s edge” – a redefinition that could be significant as the water levels of the Great Lakes drop. (Some of this drop, it must be added, will come from mass extractions of water by private bottlers – which means that one act of enclosure will be accelerating another act of enclosure.)

Changing Chandler

On Open Enterprise blog.