How Do You Say "Commons" in Chinese?

One of the key themes of this blog is the idea of a commons, be it one constructed out of free software, open content or DNA. But as the very word suggests, there is a very specific history behind the concept, which raises an interesting question: how relevant is it in other cultures? Is it even meaningful if there is no corresponding equivalent?

Here are some interesting thoughts on the situation in China:

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer of Chinese descent from Bangalore, gave a brilliant talk (I'm told all his talks are brilliant - this was the first time I've heard him speak) titled "How Does An Asian Commons Mean." No, that's not a typo. He points out that "the metaphor of the commons as it is used in debates on information emerges from a specific history of the enclosures movement in Europe." The task of articulating an Asian Commons requires more than merely translating existing initiatives such as Creative Commons, but rather "to answer larger questions of what it means to provide an epistemological account of the commons in Asia." This is especially challenging because the idea that one can consider oneself "Asian" and that such a label has real cultural or social meaning "is a "diplomatic fiction... neither Asia nor commons has any substantive content."

Fascinating stuff.

Fool Britannia: Why Aren't We Using Firefox?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Crowdsourcing Security

Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological "dirty bombs" and nuclear weapons.

Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach.

That's the way to do it: you co-opt people by making them part of society's tracking system, rather than regarding everyone as a potential terrorist who needs to be tracked. (Via Slashdot.)

Freeing French Growth with Free Software

Amongst many other things, one matter that they order better in France is the production of government reports with a grand sweep. One was published a couple of days ago, with the self-explanatory title Rapport de la Commission pour la libération de la croissance française.

Well, anything that talks about "libération" obviously makes my one-track mind think of free software, and I wasn't disappointed, since one of the report's proposals is about precisely that:

Promouvoir la concurrence entre logiciels propriétaires et logiciels « libres ».

Le patrimoine d’applications dites « libres » ou « open source », créées par une communauté active, représente l’équivalent de 131 000 années/hommes, dont pratiquement la moitié provient de programmeurs européens. Si le coût virtuel en est de 12 Md €, le coût réel est de 1,2 Md € et les communautés de logiciels libres s’engagent gracieusement à proposer en continu des améliorations et des applications. Le logiciel libre induit une économie moyenne de 36 % en recherche et développement pour les entreprises utilisatrices. Il permet de créer une concurrence pour les logiciels propriétaires, dont les avantages sont différents. Leur part de marché n’est aujourd’hui que de 2 % (avec une croissance annuelle de 40 %) contre 98 % pour les logiciels dits « propriétaires ». Pour développer la concurrence, une série d’actions est nécessaire :

• Promouvoir la concurrence entre les logiciels propriétaires et les logiciels libres dans les appels d’offres, notamment publics. Un objectif de 20 % des applications nouvellement développées ou installées au profit du secteur public en open source pourrait être fixé à l’horizon 2012.

• Considérer fiscalement, comme aux États-Unis, les aides aux communautés des logiciels libres comme du mécénat de compétence.

• Exiger, à un niveau européen dans le cadre de la politique de la concurrence entre solutions logicielles, la fixation de normes internationales garantissant l’interopérabilité entre logiciels libres et les logiciels propriétaires, en priorité.

There are some important points here.

First, that out of 316 recommendations, one should be explicitly about free software. Secondly, that the virtue of promoting the increased use of free software over proprietary software is recognised. Thirdly, there is an ambitious target that 20% of new installations of software by the French government should be open source by 2012.

Finally, and in some ways most importantly, there is a call for interoperability between free software and proprietary code to be mandated at a European level. In the context of Microsoft's recent setback at the hands of the European Commission on precisely this point, I think we can see which way the wind is blowing.

Vive l’interopérabilité!

William Gibson Looks Back from the Future

What do you get when one of the sharpest journalists interviews one of the sharpest writers? This:

You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?

It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

Unmissable. (Via Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard.)

Sharing Rules of Thumb

One of the key properties of open endeavours is winnowing down and sharing of essential information so that others can build on it. Here's a site that seems to be a distant cousin:

A hundred years ago, people used rules of thumb to make up for a lack of facts. Modern­ day rule of thumbing is rooted in an overabun­dance of facts. The average person, confronted with the Internet’s oceans of data and multiple overlapping Ph.D. dissertations, often is as perplexed as a pioneer chemist trying to whip up a little gun­powder without a formula. A pilot in a tight spot doesn't ask questions about aeronautical en­gineering; a pilot in a tight spot asks "now what?" There are times when you don't need to know the best way to do something. These are times for ballpark figures, for knowing what you probably can get away with.

Surprisingly addictive. (Via Joho the Blog.)

Will Google's Android Lead to HAL 9000?

Google's Android platform remains something of an unknown quantity: until real-life applications of it start to come through, it is hard to know whether it will be fab or a flop. But in one respect it is clearly a breakthrough, in that its openness allows people to try out new ideas that were difficult or even impossible with closed systems:

Nikita Ivanov and his 14 employees are working on an application that would harness the processing power within millions of cell phones to create one big supercomputer. The idea is to enable companies and government agencies to exploit all the idle computing power in their employees' mobile phones and perhaps even handsets belonging to non-employees who have agreed to lease that spare capacity.

To create this "grid" computing application, Ivanov's startup firm has chosen a mobile software platform that doesn't yet run on a single commercially available phone. Rather than Windows Mobile or the Symbian operating system, GridGain is using Android, a platform spearheaded by Google that has drawn scores of software developers with its promise of flexibility to create unusual applications.

GridGain is one of thousands of Android-based projects in the works. Another would enable users to record and share audio tours of museums or galleries. One is a music player that can connect a cell-phone user with people who have similar musical tastes and happen to be nearby. All underscore the ways that developers hope to use Android to take phones in new directions with greater ease than today's prominent wireless platforms.

Welcome to the FOSSBazaar

On Open Enterprise blog.

Lost for Words

The world is poorer today:

Marie Smith Jones, who worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded member of Alaska's Eyak Indians and the last fluent speaker of their native language, has died. She was 89.

(Via Language Log.)

Open Architecture...Spaceships?

Out of this world:

Virgin Galactic on Wednesday unveiled designs for SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, two vehicles that are designed to usher in private spaceflight. The technology behind the system will have an open architecture “like Linux,” said officials.

Well, if nothing else, it shows how the meme is taking off...

Without Costing an Arm and a Leg

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mark His Words

Here's a post well worth reading:

Yesterday, we saw the most extraordinary failure of economic leadership in recent years, when the US Federal Reserve pressed the “emergency morphine” button and cut Federal Reserve rates by 0.75%. It will not help.

These are extremely testing times, and thus far, the US Fed under Bernanke has been found wanting. Historians may well lay the real blame for current distress at the door of Alan Greenspan, who pioneered the use of morphine to dull economic pain, but they will probably also credit him with a certain level of discretion in its prescription. During Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed, economic leaders became convinced that the solution to market distress was to ensure that the financial system had access to easy money.

Pretty standard Economist-type analysis you might think; but what's interesting about this lengthy piece is that it's written by Mark Shuttleworth, head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. What struck was not just that it's extremely well written, but that he took the time and trouble to pen it. I don't think there are many CEOs who would be both willing and able to do so.

I think we can deduce from from this is that Canonical - and hence a key player working towards GNU/Linux on the desktop - is in good hands.

From Fair Dealing to Fair Sharing

What's interesting about the site "I Wouldn't Steal" is not so much the message - that downloading files is not the same as stealing handbags - but that a political party, albeit the Greens, has created it, along with a neat little YouTube video to get the message across. In other words, it marks a move from a purely passive resistance to the media conglomerates' continuing efforts to re-write the law to suit themselves, to a more militant one that strives to get alternative viewpoints across.

I think this is important, because at the moment the general public is very confused about copyright (and intellectual monopolies in general). That suits the content companies, and shows that the way forward is by educating people so that they can understand what the deeper issues are.

Alfresco Gets Funding for Growth

On Open Enterprise blog.

An Insider's History of the Metaverse

It was sad news that Cory Ondrejka was parting company with Second Life, but it looks like there's a silver lining:

I think it would be fun to make a semi-regular part of this site different moments from my memories of the first 7 years of Second Life.

Once upon a time,

Around August of 2001, back when Second Life was called Linden World, there was no scripting language in SL. Primitar was about to replace the spaceships and floating eyeballs that were the original avatars and James was doing the first major UI revamp so that we could add to the world without shooting. The entire team had been debating how to add behavior into the system for months, with Philip arguing that we should just use physics. Philip had some really good points, because if we were able to use Havok for all of our behaviors, residents would be able to gauge the complexity of an object by just looking at it -- like mechanical systems in the real world -- and we wouldn't have to divert scarce resources into a project that could take significant time and effort. Mitch was also an advocate of visual complexity representing behavioral complexity, and I think there was something to that idea.

Now read on...

International Journal of the Commons, Vol 2, No 1

Now out.

Microsoft: Trapped in the Web of the Past

On Open Enterprise blog.

Magna Carta and the Commons

Here's an old but wonderful essay drawing out the many connections between the Magna Carta and the commons. Its sweep is broad:

While the Magna Carta is singular, an English peculiarity, its story is one of oppression, rebellion, and betrayal. It has become a story with global significance. We are commoners looking in at it from the outside. We have seen its history from the robber barons who became chivalric knights who became law lords who became “founding fathers.” Having studied their doings in the forest, in Palestine, in the law court, on the frontier, and now in Iraq, we have learned to be suspicious.

Open Enterprise Interview: Fabrizio Capobianco

On Open Enterprise blog.

This is What the Internet Was Invented For

Who needs television, when you've got WikipediaVision?

WikipediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English (and the German, French, Spanish) Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen.

Be warned, this is totally addictive. (Via if:book.)

Facebook Does Collaborative Localisations

A novel approach to localisation:

They are picking and choosing markets (Spanish was opened first, two weeks ago; today German and French were launched) and asking just a few users to test out their collaborative translation tool. Once the tool is perfected and enough content has been translated, Facebook will offer users the ability to quickly switch the language on the site, per their preference.

Not hard to see this becoming more common.

Security by Obscurity? I Don't Think So

Great post by Ed Felten about the complete mess the Dutch authorities have made of their new $2 billion transit card system, which, it seems, is wide open to cracking:

Why?

Kerckhoffs’s Principle, one of the bedrock maxims of cryptography, says that security should never rely on keeping an algorithm secret. It’s okay to have a secret key, if the key is randomly chosen and can be changed when needed, but you should never bank on an algorithm remaining secret.

Unfortunately the designers of Mifare Classic did not follow this principle. Instead, they chose to combine a secret algorithm with a relatively short 48-bit key. This is a problem because once you know the algorithm it’s possible for an attacker to search the entire 48-bit key space, and therefore to forge cards, in a matter or days or weeks.

More generally:

Now the Dutch authorities have a mess on their hands. About $2 billion have been invested in this project, but serious fraud seems likely if it is deployed as designed. This kind of disaster would have been more likely had the design process been more open. Secrecy was not only an engineering mistake (violating Kerckhoffs’s Principle) but also a policy mistake, as it allowed the project to get so far along before independent analysts had a chance to critique it. A more open process, like the one the U.S. government used in choosing the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) would have been safer. Governments seem to have a hard time understanding that openness can make you more secure.

Let's hope other governments are listening...

Fighting Words

Here, take this spoon:

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML.

That’s according to two blog postings from the end of last week by Microsoft execs involved in the OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) standards battle.

Update: Rob Weir offers the customary razor-sharp analysis to sort out what's really going on.

Go Get a (Tiny) Life

One of the best and most important books on the rise of virtual worlds - albeit a text-based one in this case - and the deep issues they raise is now freely available:

I am pleased to announce that my first book, the widely cited but long out-of-print MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), can now be downloaded in its entirety in a handsomely formatted PDF edition, completely free of charge. Or, if you prefer, the fine folks at Lulu will package up a perfect-bound paperback version for you at the shockingly reasonable price of only $17.48 ($5 of which goes straight to me). Either way, you get what for the last eight years or so could not be had for love or money: A brand new and fully authorized copy of MY TINY LIFE, yours to read, lend, dog-ear, shelve, and otherwise make use of in whatever way your heart desires and copyright permits.

And don't miss the author's fascinating explanation of how hard it proved to give something away thanks to the byzantine world of global copyright.

The Joy of Code

Thankfully we seem to be moving beyond the simplistic idea that code written and given away for nothing is worth nothing. But not everyone has gasped the corollary: that the you get better code if you *don't* pay for it. Why? Because passion is a better motivator than pounds and pence.

If you're sceptical, trying this post that reviews the growing evidence that external rewards demage intrinsic motivations:

As many of you know, I'm really interested in the question of "Would you do it again for free?" If you take developers that are working on open source software for free and you pay them, if you stop paying them, will they still work on open source software? This was the topic of my keynote at GUADEC and will be the topic of my keynotes at LinuxConf Australia and SCALE - the story continues to evolve as I learn more. One of the things I started with was a search to see if there was any relevant data out there. I found the following five studies that explore how external rewards affect internal or intrinsic rewards

Those studies tend to suggest that rewarding people for doing something produces less good results than relying on their personal passion or altruism. Creating something and giving it away is not only better for those who receive, it's also better for those who give.