Hacking Ashley Highfield

Some might say I've been overly critical of the BBC's digital boss, Ashley Highfield (no, no). Be that as it may, it's certainly true that I've not offered any concrete solutions for changing his mind about the urgency of divorcing iPlayer from Microsoft (and no, Macintosh implementations do *not* count). Maybe this is the way:

The BBC's George Wright and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon offered to install the OS on a laptop for Ashley to take home and experiment with. We're hoping that both George and Ashley will be posting about the experience.

Nice move, Jono.

Open Enterprise Interview: Stefane Fermigier

On Open Enterprise blog.

Photoshop on GNU/Linux

As I've noted elsewhere, free software is absolutely central to Google's success and future. Here's some further proof - it's helping to get Photoshop running on GNU/Linux using Wine:

"Photoshop is one of those applications that Desktop linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now," Google engineer and Wine release manager Dan Kegel wrote. "About 200 patches were committed to winehq, and as of wine-0.9.54, Photoshop CS2 is quite usable," Kegel noted in a separate post.

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

Motivation of Open Projects Volunteers

More info is always good, especially when it's about open source. So here's what sounds a worthy endeavour:

My name is Zbigniew Braniecki and I'm a sociology student at Leon Koźmiński Academy in Warsaw.

The goal of this survey is to extend our knowledge about nature of volunteer participation in the Internet open communities. To learn why people participate and what keeps them going.

It will allow us to better understand how open communities (should) work and who the people building them are.

The survey is made of two parts, socio and psychological. It will be most helpful if you make it to the end.

The whole survey will take you no more than 12 minutes to complete.

Thank you for your help. The results will be publicly available on the Interent.

Is Europeana Too Flash?

I've written before about the nascent European Digital Library:

Consistent with the i2010 digital library initiative, this thematic network will build consensus to create the European Digital Library. It will find solutions to the interoperability of the cultural content held by European museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries in the context of The European Digital Library.

Now we have a chance to try it out - at least as a demo. It's cross-linking is impressively rich, but I do worry that we're going to end up with something too flashy - or, rather, too Flashy, with lots of invisible code that makes deep linking impossible. We shall see - or maybe not....

Charlie's Not My Darling (Again)

Charlie McCreevy is a one-man disaster area: first he tries to bring in software patents for the European Union, now he wants to extend copyright for performers. I could rant about this but Mike Masnick has already said everything that needs to be said:

It's important to be entirely clear here: this is a total and complete bastardization of copyright law. Copyright law was intended to grant the creator of content a deal: you create new content and we will give you a limited time monopoly on the rights to that content before passing it on to the public domain, from which everyone can benefit. It was designed as an incentive system, providing a gov't backed monopoly in exchange for the creation of content. By creating content and accepting that deal, musicians clearly said that it was a reasonable deal. To later go back and change the terms for content already created and extend copyright makes no sense and is violating the contract made with the public. You can't newly incent someone to create content that they already created 50 years ago. Thus, the only reason to extend copyright is if you believe that it's really a welfare system for musicians. If that's the case, then we should be explicit about it, and present it that way, rather than calling it copyright.

That's not all that McCreevy has up his sleeve either. He's also apparently a huge fan of copyright levies that add taxes to any blank media for the sake of reimbursing musicians just in case you happen to use that blank media to record unauthorized material. It's effectively a you must be a criminal tax. So, basically, McCreevy's plan is to treat all consumers as criminals, forcing them to cough up extra money for musicians, while also setting up a welfare system for musicians hidden in the copyright system. Musicians must love him, but it's a bit ridiculous for him to claim these proposals make sense because "copyright protection for Europe's performers represents a moral right to control the use of their work and earn a living from their performances". Does Mr. McCreevy earn a living from something he did 50 years ago? Does Mr. McCreevy get a cut every time a consumer buys something just in case they commit a crime?

Superb stuff, Mike.

Code is Law is Code

Code and law have been inextricably mixed ever since Richard Stallman drew up the first GNU GPL. Indeed, in many ways, the logical processes for crafting both are similar - which is probably handy. Nonetheless, law does present special problems that hackers need to be aware of.

To provide some help, the Software Freedom Law Center has just put together a useful legal issues primer for open source and free software projects:

This Primer provides a baseline of knowledge about those areas of the law, intending to support productive conversations between clients and lawyers about specific legal needs. We aim to improve the conversation between lawyer and client, but not to make it unnecessary, because law, like most things in life, very rarely has clear cut answers. Solutions for legal problems must be crafted in light of the particulars of each client’s situation. What is best for one client in one situation, may very well not be best for another client in the same situation, or even the same client in the same situation at a later date or in a different place. Law cannot yield attainable certainty because it is dynamic, inconsistent, and incapable of mastery by pure rote memorization. This is why we do not provide forms or other tools for “do it yourself” lawyering, which are almost always insufficient and, in fact, can be very harmful to a project’s interests.

The specific topics addressed herein are:

1. copyrights and licensing,
2. organizational structure,
3. patents, and
4. trademarks.

They are presented in this order because that most closely aligns with the life-cycle of the legal needs of a typical FOSS project. When code is written, copyrights immediately come into being. The terms under which the owner of those copyrights allows others to copy, modify and distribute the code determine whether it is considered “free” and/or “open source.” Once a project gains speed, many benefits can be achieved by the creation of an organizational entity for the project that is separate from the project’s individual developers. After successful public release of a project, patent and trademark issues may arise that need attention.

Happy Birthday, Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is the nearest thing to an official definition of open access that we have. Today is apparently its sixth birthday. If you want to find out more about BOAI and what's happened in those six years, where better to go than the man who helped draw up that definition, Peter Suber?

And what better birthday present could open access have have than this announcement that Harvard, or at least The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be adopting it as standard policy?

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

What Davos Can Teach Us

The World Economic Forum is a fairly disgusting dance of power and money, but even in this context intelligent observers can learn something useful. For example, here are Brian Behlendorf's thoughts on the problems of getting people to understand and engage with true openness:

On the downside: twice, I mentioned ODF vs. OOXML in conversations with people, and each time, there was a lack of awareness of the issue. I really don't want to embarrass them so I won't name names, but they were people who really should have known; one was a leader of a business that has been around for years and has serious document management and longevity issues, the other a government official who was charged with preserving his country's culture but sadly non-technical. In both cases, the initial response was along the lines of "this is a mess that you techies have created, I expect you to clean it up", as if it was simply a matter of defects in code that a company like Microsoft would be cleaning up quickly. If it turned out that valuable company data from 1993 were in a Word file format that couldn't be properly read by Office 2008, then they'd simply hire someone or a firm to dive in and repair it by hand. I believe I brought both of them around to understanding how it's not just a matter of bugfixing or outsourcing the problem, that it is a knowlege and institutional threat, and the role they need to play as informed customers in pressuring vendors to do the right thing. But, Microsoft's judo-move with OOXML of appearing to do the "right" thing that isn't actually right in practice has more power than I think you or I would wish were true.

Striking Back Against the Three-Strikes Rule

As I noted yesterday, the idea of banning people from the Internet after "three strikes" is both outrageous and unworkable. One reason advanced for the latter is that people may be piggybacking on your wireless router, so they get the files and you get the blame.

That may well be true, but I find this rather weak as a potential defence, since it means that you would need to leave your router open, which many would be chary about. But I've just realised that there's a way to do this that goes beyond simply leaving it open and hoping: you join the Fon community, which is all about opening up your router in a controlled way. What's even better, is that it's backed by none other than BT in the UK:

BT and FON have joined forces to create a Wi-Fi community that allows its members to connect for free to thousands of places around the UK and the world, by simply sharing some of their Internet connection at home.

This tie-up with BT always struck me as masterly, because it meant that Fon was suddenly "official", and not some wild hacker thing that ought to be shut down. And yet shutting it down is the only way you could stop strangers from downloading copyright material through your shared connection.

So the three-strikes idea comes down, in part, to this: whether the UK government really wants to scupper BT's attempts to provide "Wifi for everyone", as it puts it, to keep a few lazy media companies quiet for a while - until they realise that plan 'C' has failed too.

Embarrassed by DRM

Here's a telling comment:

The point behind all this is, of course, to conceal the very existence of DRM from the user – Microsoft is so keen on this that it won't use the term itself at all. The vast majority of iTunes users have no idea their content is being "protected" through Apple's FairPlay DRM, and while a vocal minority seem to be driving the music world away from DRM'd music, it's hard to imagine Hollywood (or Bollywood) being so keen on sharing their labours.

Ergo, we need to shout about the presence of DRM from the rooftops: the more people know about it, the more they will dislike it, as Microsoft well understands....

Google's New Open Source Blog

On Open Enterprise blog.

Opening the Mirror

Der Spiegel is the greatest news magazine in the world, bar none. It makes The Economist look superficial, and yet constantly surprises with the range of its coverage.

A little while back, writing about Focus, its main rival - although that's really too strong a word, good though Focus is - and the fact that the latter was providing free access to its archive, I made the wish that Der Spiegel would follow suit.

Apparently, it has. It's called Spiegel Wissen, and I may be some time....

Must Do Better, BECTA

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Thin End of the Software Patents Wedge

On Open Enterprise blog.

A New Star in the UK Open Source Blogosphere

On Open Enterprise blog.

Next Up for Enterprise Open Source: Nexenta?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Alfresco's Open Source Barometer

On Open Enterprise blog.

Three Strikes and the Media Industry is Out

So the music and film industries want to follow Sarko's daft plan:

People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.

Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt.

Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.

Broadband companies who fail to enforce the “three-strikes” regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.

Well, if they want three strikes and out, try these for size:

Strike One

The music and then film industries failed to recognise that digital downloads were the future. Instead of embracing this incredibly efficient way of distributing content, the industries have fought it tooth and nail. Since there was no legal way to download materials, users were forced to turn to alternative sources.

Strike Two

When it became blindingly obvious that users wanted digital files, the media industry eventually provided them - in the hideously hobbled form of DRM'd formats. Which meant, once more, that people who wanted content that they could use on all their computers and players were forced to turn to other sources.

Strike Three

The present move. Leaving aside the civil liberties angle - the fact that ISPs become the media industries' spies - and that the UK government proposes propping up a dying business model for no other reason than the said industries demand it, even when there is evidence that sharing music *increases* sales of media - it won't work. The instant this becomes law, the number of sites offering encrypted downloads, which are impossible to check in transit, will mushroom, just as decentralised P2P systems sprang up once Napster was nobbled.

The upside is that average user will probably start using encrypting routinely, thus putting the kibosh on Echelon's easy access to everyone's Internet traffic.

Update: Moreover:

UK government proposals to make ISPs take action against the estimated six million users who access pirated online material every year could prompt an explosion in Wi-Fi hijacking, experts warned today.

Microsoft Cunctator

Here's a classic example of how Microsoft plays the delaying game:

Microsoft’s rival Sun Microsystems had complained to the Commission that the US software giant would not grant it data needed to ensure that Windows was interoperable.

“Microsoft’s defence was that the information was covered by intellectual property rights,” Hellstrom said. “This argument was never used when Sun asked for the information. It was only used in the eleventh hour. Microsoft showed one patent a day before we adopted our decision [in 2004].”

One day before: obviously hoping to throw yet another spanner in the regulatory works.

Flickrvision

I wrote recently about the wonderful WikipediaVision: be warned, if you thought that was good, you'll love Flickrvision too - and have even less time left to do useful things in your life.... (Via Commonsblog.)

Free Thinking

I have been accused of being "sniffy" about Kevin Kelly's meditation on eight new scarcities created by free; well, be that as it may. However, I was much more impressed by an earlier essay, pointed out by Chris Anderson, called "Technology Wants to be Free", which seems much meatier to me. It contains lots of concrete examples of how the cost of commodities inevitably tend to zero, and concludes with this important thought:

The odd thing about free technology is that the “free as in beer” part is actually a distraction. As I have argued elsewhere (see my 2002 New York Times Magazine article on the future of music for example) the great attraction of “free” music is only partially that it does not cost anything. The chief importance of free music (and other free things) is held in the second English meaning of the word: free as in “freedom.” Free music is more than piracy because the freedom in the free digital downloads suddenly allowed music lovers to do all kinds of things with this music that they had longed to do but were unable to do before things were “free.” The “free” in digital music meant the audience could unbundled it from albums, sample it, create their own playlists, embed it, share it with love, bend it, graph it in colors, twist it, mash it, carry it, squeeze it, and enliven it with new ideas. The free-ization made it liquid and ‘free” to interact with other media. In the context of this freedom, the questionable legality of its free-ness was secondary. It didn’t really matter because music had been liberated by the free, almost made into a new media.

Catalonian Androids

Google's Android makes its debut in Barcelona:

The first mobile phones fitted with Google's Android software platform made their debut at an industry trade show on Monday, a key advance in the struggle to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.

But the most interesting part of this report was the following:

Although the technology on display Monday is in prototype form, experts and journalists were so eager to witness its demonstration that all places for private displays were booked out on Monday within the first hour of the show.

Well, there's clearly some pent-up demand *there*.

DAB Dying?

It might seem strange that an avowed lover of high-tech and music should not have a DAB radio: but so it is with me. In part, it's because DAB in the UK seems to be worse than FM (at least that's what Jack Schofield says, and his argument looks pretty reasonable).

But it's also been from a gut feeling that this is the wrong way to go. It looks like I'm not alone:

In a sign of crisis for digital radio, UK commercial radio leader GCap will, as expected, sell its 67 percent stake in the DigitalOne DAB multiplex

...

”We believe that broadband is the ideal complementary platform to analogue radio given the interactivity that they both provide, creating social networks and communities on-air and online.”

I suppose what I'm looking towards is a radio with built-in Wifi to pick up radio-over-IP signals sent out by one of my computers. One reason for that is the extremely high quality of music online these days: BBC Radio 3, for example, is broadcast at 64 kps, which is pretty much CD quality in a domestic setting. Who needs DAB?

XML People: Tim B on TimBL

Here's a rather wonderful document by Tim Bray, one of the key people in the XML world, and someone who evidently knows everyone else there:

XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long.

It's also really good for its witty pen portraits of XML notables. Here's a sample: Tim B on TimBL:

TimBL is thin, pale, and twitchy, a well-bred British baby-boomer who circumlocutes and temporizes and gets to the point slowly. Englishly, he deplores confrontation and can find a way to paint any blood-feud in the colours of unfortunate misunderstanding. His publications suggest strong idealism, an overriding vision of the future of information space. His detractors say he’s a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky. The McArthur foundation says he’s a genius. I can’t figure out what he’s getting at half the time, or why he does things, but I’ve known a couple of real geniuses and that’s not necessarily a symptom.

However, I take exception to that idea of TimBL being "a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky." Not so much because it's insulting Sir Tim, but because I think it misses the point entirely. Like RMS's, TimBL's greatest contribution is not actually technical: it is ethical.

Had he not put his code into the public domain - after briefly flirting with the idea of licensing it under the GNU GPL - the Web would not have become the greatest invention of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is for his inspired altruism that we salute Sir Tim - not for anything so trivial as a markup language.