Nokia Buys Trolltech

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU GPL: It's Irrevocable

I know by now you've seen the notice by the guy claiming to "revoke" the GPL license on his code, because I'm getting email about it.

Here's the answer to your question:

No. One can't retroactively revoke licenses previously granted, unless the license terms allow you to do so. The most you can do is stop granting new licenses.

Obvious, innit?

Open Students

Welcome to Open Students, a new blog for students about open access to research.

...


Open Students is proudly sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.

This is a shrewd move: get 'em while they're young....

Radiohead: The Meme Spreads

the UK band known as the Charlatans are joining Saul Williams and Radiohead with their next album release with a ‘name your own price’ mechanism for distribution.

What's also interesting is that the meme is spreading in part via an emerging community:

It is also worthy of note that a camaraderie of sorts seems to be forming in this new ‘underground’ distribution technique. The record producer that mixed You Cross My Path and The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, Alan Moulder, is best known as the producer for Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Now, he’s making a new name for himself as producer to the free crowd.

FixYa Fixes the Real-Life Support Hole

Although free software has a reputation for patchy documentation and non-existent support, that's not really true at all: there's buckets of stuff out there, usually written by extremely knowledgeable people, and lots of enthusiasts ready to advise. What *is* true, is that everyday consumer devices haven't had anything like that deep, community-generated online support.

FixYa asks: why not?

FixYa was founded by a frustrated consumer who noticed that most manufacturers of gadgets, electronics and consumer products were not providing adequate technical support through their web sites, despite these products becoming more and more technologically advanced. Whether it was a digital camera, printer, or laptop - manufacturers were not allocating the necessary resources to meet customers' increased demand for technical support, troubleshooting, and easy access to product manuals. It was from this lack of easy-to-access technical information and product support that the FixYa online technical support community was formed.

FixYa is now the largest online source for free technical advice on gadgets, electronic equipment and consumer products. FixYa users can quickly and easily post technical questions for Experts in the FixYa troubleshooting forums - seeking solutions for problems or advice/instructions on proper usage of a product. Users can also upgrade to Premium Assistance to get fast, guaranteed technical assistance from Top Experts - via posting or Live Chat.

The power of FixYa stems from the unique, community-generated content found in the FixYa troubleshooting forums. Technical problems and solutions posted on FixYa are based on users' real life experiences, rather than the hypothetical scenarios presented in product manufacturers' FAQs. And through FixYa's unique rating system, problem solutions are continually refined, with the goal of offering users the most helpful and accurate technical support information possible for any consumer product.

Sounds like a classic open source/open content/user-generated business model. But the cynic in me said that it was doubtless deeply flawed by wickedly appropriating all that content for itself. Nope:

All content, either text, pictures, or graphics, on the site that has been contributed by users is designated as Open Content. All such content may be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted as long as (1) it is not displayed on a commercial site (except on message boards) or used for commercial purposes, (2) prominent attribution is given to FixYa, and (3) attribution is given to the original author(s) as listed on FixYa.com. If the original author is listed as "Anonymous" on FixYa.com, attribution to the author is not required.

FixYa maintains a compilation copyright on its user-submitted content. This user-submitted content may by reproduced in part for non-commercial purposes as described in the paragraph above, but may not be reproduced as a whole through any medium without the express permission of FixYa.com.

My only criticism would be that "Open Content" is rather vague here. Maybe it would be better to use the cc-by-nc licence, which seems to fit the bill.

Get Creative with Creative Content Online

The European Commission wants your help:

On 03/01/2008, the Commission adopted a Communication on Creative Content Online which launches further actions to support the development of innovative business models and the deployment of cross-border delivery of diverse online creative content services.

The transfer of creative content services to the online environment is an example of major systemic change. Building on the results of the 2006 consultation process, while complementing the initiatives already undertaken in the context of the i2010 strategy, the Commission intends to launch further actions to support the development of innovative business models and the deployment of cross-border delivery of diverse online creative content services.

That's good; less good is that among the four challenges are two where the Commission has got it all wrong:

Interoperability and transparency of Digital Rights Management systems (DRMs) - Technologies allowing management of rights in the online environment can be a key enabler for the content sector's digital shift and for the development of innovative business models - especially with regard to high value content. As lengthy discussions among stakeholders did not yet lead to the deployment of interoperable DRM solutions, there is a need to set a framework for transparency of DRMs regarding interoperability, by ensuring proper consumer information with regards to usage restrictions and interoperability.

Legal offers and piracy - Piracy and unauthorised up- and downloading of copyrighted content remains a central concern. It would seem appropriate to instigate co-operation procedures ("code of conduct") between access/service providers, right holders and consumers in order to ensure a wide online offer of attractive content, consumer-friendly online services, adequate protection of copyrighted works, awareness raising/education on the importance of copyright for the availability of content and close cooperation fight piracy/unauthorised file-sharing.

DRM is a dying model; the idea of trying to make such a dinosaur technology compatible across the EU is bonkers. Even worse is the thought that ISPs should be policing content, or that we should be brainwashing children to chant the multifaceted marvellousness of intellectual monopolies. Time to get those word-processors sharpened....

Just Drop It

Oh, great:

Music Drop

In one gesture

One drop that contains one song which can be used only one time to emphasize the value of the product and the meaning of giving.

As in: introduce an artifical scarcity where there is none? And add to the heap of poisonous high-tech detritus we dump in the environment while you're at it? Nein, danke. (Via The Next Web blog.)

Miles Better?

I am constantly struck by the fact that the more you ponder certain things, the more complex they get. One area where that's particularly true is sustainability: trying to balance the pros and cons or actions can lead to serious headaches.

Take the issue of organic food, for example. This is clearly good, since it uses less pesticides, does less damage blah-blah-blah. Ah, but now we find that much of that organic food is being produced in Africa, and then air-freighted to the West. So clearly that is bad, since the damage caused by carbon emissions must outweigh the good derived from the organic nature of the farming. Or maybe not:

Global warming is a universal concern (with a strong African dimension too), and carbon emissions merit growing vigilance. But a global problem demands global solutions. Trade policy can be used to set the right incentives for sustainable development. But focusing too narrowly on long-distance transportation of organic produce is false economy: bad for the environment and bad for development.

One thing is for sure: more information may make things harder to parse, but it is also the only hope we have for arriving at the right decision. Keep on pondering.

Open Architecture Network

We all know about open network architecture, but what about the Open Architecture Network?

The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. Here designers of all persuasions can:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future

Open source is about sharing code patterns, Open Architecture is about sharing building patterns. Obvious, when you think about it. (Via C|net.)

Genomics Goes Read-Write

One of Larry Lessig's favourite tropes is that we live in a read-write world these days, where creation is just as important as consumption. Well, hitherto, genomics has been pretty much read only: you could sequence the DNA of an organism, but creating entire genomes of complex organisms (such as bacteria) has been too tricky. Now that nice Dr Venter says he's gone and done it:

A team of 17 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. This work, published online today in the journal Science by Dan Gibson, Ph.D., et al, is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, which is ongoing at the JCVI, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.

The team achieved this technical feat by chemically making DNA fragments in the lab and developing new methods for the assembly and reproduction of the DNA segments. After several years of work perfecting chemical assembly, the team found they could use homologous recombination (a process that cells use to repair damage to their chromosomes) in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to rapidly build the entire bacterial chromosome from large subassemblies.

He even gives some details (don't try this at home):

The process to synthesize and assemble the synthetic version of the M. genitalium chromosome began first by resequencing the native M. genitalium genome to ensure that the team was starting with an error free sequence. After obtaining this correct version of the native genome, the team specially designed fragments of chemically synthesized DNA to build 101 “cassettes” of 5,000 to 7,000 base pairs of genetic code. As a measure to differentiate the synthetic genome versus the native genome, the team created “watermarks” in the synthetic genome. These are short inserted or substituted sequences that encode information not typically found in nature. Other changes the team made to the synthetic genome included disrupting a gene to block infectivity. To obtain the cassettes the JCVI team worked primarily with the DNA synthesis company Blue Heron Technology, as well as DNA 2.0 and GENEART.

From here, the team devised a five stage assembly process where the cassettes were joined together in subassemblies to make larger and larger pieces that would eventually be combined to build the whole synthetic M. genitalium genome. In the first step, sets of four cassettes were joined to create 25 subassemblies, each about 24,000 base pairs (24kb). These 24kb fragments were cloned into the bacterium Escherichia coli to produce sufficient DNA for the next steps, and for DNA sequence validation.

The next step involved combining three 24kb fragments together to create 8 assembled blocks, each about 72,000 base pairs. These 1/8th fragments of the whole genome were again cloned into E. coli for DNA production and DNA sequencing. Step three involved combining two 1/8th fragments together to produce large fragments approximately 144,000 base pairs or 1/4th of the whole genome.

At this stage the team could not obtain half genome clones in E. coli, so the team experimented with yeast and found that it tolerated the large foreign DNA molecules well, and that they were able to assemble the fragments together by homologous recombination. This process was used to assemble the last cassettes, from 1/4 genome fragments to the final genome of more than 580,000 base pairs. The final chromosome was again sequenced in order to validate the complete accurate chemical structure.

But the real kicker was this comment:

“This is an exciting advance for our team and the field. However, we continue to work toward the ultimate goal of inserting the synthetic chromosome into a cell and booting it up to create the first synthetic organism,” said Dan Gibson, lead author.

Yup, you read that correctly: we're talking about porting and then *booting-up* an artificial genome, aka digital code of life.

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...