Everyone Loves an Open Source Hacker

On Open Enterprise blog.

End Software Patents Now!

One of the most remarkable - and heartening - changes in recent years has been in the attitude to software patents. Until a few years back, there was a certain fatalism regarding these particularly pernicious intellectual monopolies, as if they belonged, with death and taxes, to the inevitable and immutable. But people have started fighting back, both in terms of seeking to have patents revoked, and trying to get the entire category abolished.

The latest manifestation of this is the End Software Patents site:

Every company is in the software business, which means that every company has software liability. We estimate $11.4 billion a year is spent on software patent litigation (see our resources for economists page), and not just by Microsoft and IBM—The Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor are facing software patent infringement lawsuits for their use of the standard software necessary for running a modern business.

Software innovation happens without government intervention. Virtually all of the technologies you use now, was developed before software was widely viewed as patentable. The Web, email, your word processor and spreadsheet program, instant messaging, or even more technical features like the psychoachoustic encoding and Huffman compression underlying the MP3 standard—all of it was originally developed by enthusiastic programmers, many of whom have formed successful business around such software, none of whom asked the government for a monopoly. So if software authors have a proven track-record of innovation without patents, why force them to use patents? What is the gain from billions of dollars in patent litigation?

Best of all on what is sure to become one of the central sites in the fight against patents, are the resources. Even though I follow this area closely, I was amazed at just how much hard evidence there is that software patents are harmful from just about every point of view. Victory just got closer.

Google Sites – Not Your Father's JotSpot

On Open Enterprise blog.

WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio Goes AGPL

On Open Enterprise blog.

Not That They're Desperate or Anything

In what may be an unprecedented decision, Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to lower the retail prices for several flavors of Windows Vista.

For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista, and only for the upgrade version used to move from an earlier copy of Vista. The suggested price for Vista Ultimate drops to $219 from $299, while Home Premium falls to $129, from $159.

A dog is still a dog, even it costs less.

Just How Healthy Will Google Health Be?

Ah, yes, Google Health:

Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data that will be stored in Google Health, we need to conduct our health service with the same privacy, security, and integrity users have come to expect in all our services. Google Health will protect the privacy of your health information by giving you complete control over your data. We won't sell or share your data without your explicit permission. Our privacy policy and practices have been developed in thoughtful collaboration with experts from the Google Health Advisory Council.

All highly laudable.

So what happens when somebody turns up on Google's doorstep with a warrant, demanding information about an individual? Presumably, it will fight. And what happens when somebody *doesn't* turn up on Google's doorstep with a warrant, but just wants a quiet chat about the records of someone who is - because the US government says they are, but can't reveal the details because it's a state secret - a terrible wicked evil terrorist, and anyway has a funny-sounding name? Will it fight for them, too?

Why Microsoft's New EU Fine is Just Fine

On Linux Journal.

We 'Umbly Petition....

I'm not sure that these e-petitions do any good, but since they exist, it seems churlish not to use them. Here's another one Brits may be interested in signing:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to not force internet service providers to act as legal representatives for the RIAA and be treated like a common courier.

I think they meant "not to force" and "carrier", but I doubt Gordon's going to be paying that much attention....

What Windows Server 2008 Learned from OSS

Fascinating stuff from Microsoft's Sam Ramji:

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out:

* Modular architectures
You can find these wherever you see participation at scale – and often a rearchitecture to a more modular system precedes expanded participation. Great examples of this are Firefox, OpenOffice, and X11 – from both the historical rearchitecture and the increased participation that resulted. The Apache HTTP server and APR are good examples that have been modular for as long as I can recall.

* Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers – the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux.

* Feedback-driven development
The “power user” as product manager is a powerful shift in how to build and tune software – and this class of users includes developers who are not committing code back, but instead submitting CRs and defects – resulting in a product that better fits its end users.

* Built-for-purpose systems
Most frequently seen in applications of Linux, the ability to build a system that has just what is needed to fulfill its role and nothing else (think of highly customizable distributions like Gentoo or BusyBox, as well as fully custom deployments).

* Sysadmins who write code
The ability of a skilled system administrator to write the “last mile” code means that they can make a technology work in their particular environment efficiently and often provide good feedback to developers. This is so fundamental to Unix and Linux environments that most sysadmins are competent programmers.

* Standards-based communication
Whether the standard is something from the IETF or W3C, or simply the implementation code itself, where these are used projects are more successful (think of Asterisk and IAX2) and attract a larger ecosystem of software around them.

What's interesting about this is not that it's astute analysis - which it is - but that Ramji doesn't mind making it public while admitting that Windows is learning from open source. Of course, it would be stupid not to, but it's nonetheless an important sign of how things are finally changing at Microsoft that it's prepared to trumpet the fact - and of the irreistible rise of the open source way.

Privacy Trumps Copyright in EU?

This could be big:

Today the German Constitutional Court decided that the state may not engage in surreptitious surveillance of information technology systems. The case, a constitutional complaint against a law permitting such surveillance by intelligence services, was decided on the basis of a new human right in the confidentiality and integrity of information technology systems.

...

The decision may have a dramatic impact in relation to the constitutionality of protected rights management information systems deemed to protect copyright. Where a supplier of copyright works manipulates data stored on a customers computer, or where personal data are being collected in order to allow the right holder to trace the use of works supplied online, it appears that if the customer can invoke the new right there is little left to argue for right holders that such means are necessary to protect copyright.

Now let's watch this ripple through the European Union until it reaches that nice Mr Brown and his plans to get heavy with ISPs over alleged copyright infringements on their networks....

MySQL's Disappearing Anti-Patent Page

Here's a troubling observation:

Go to the MySQL Web site and try to click on the MySQL anti-software patent page, and you won't find it. It's the other shoe dropping as MySQL today became part of Sun Microsystems, which like the rest of the commercial software and services industry, considers software patents a necessary evil.

Let's hope this isn't part of a larger trend at the new MySQL....

Free As in ...."Free Love"?

Techdirt's Mike Masnick pointed to yet another exploration of free as a business model. It's called "Free Love":

which is all about the ongoing rise of 'free stuff', and the brands already making the most it. Not to mention the millions of consumers who are happily getting into a free-for-all mindset. Yes, expectations are being set. Absorb and apply!

In fact, this is probably the best round-up to date of all the different kinds of free business models. It had all the ones I had come across, and many I hadn't.

Mike concludes his post with an excellent - and self-referential - point:

It's neat to see all of these different things come out at the same time -- once again highlighting the concept that ideas generally aren't formed in a vacuum. The trends that resulted in so many people recognizing the same thing at once are all around us. Yet, if we believed in the world where artificial scarcity rules, then we'd be focused on who "owned" this concept and who got the rights every time someone else mentioned it. That, of course, would be silly. By allowing so many different people to express these concepts, not only do we all get to see different perspectives on the same concept, but we get to learn from each other and build on these ideas.

Peace, man.

Hardware's Race to the Bottom

I've written several times about the importance of the Asus Eee PC; here's another way of looking at it:

At Sony's annual Open House event, Sony's IT product division senior vice president Mike Abary said if the Asus Eee PC starts to do well, it could potentially shift the entire notebook industry into a race to the bottom.

If mainstream PC buyers start to find their needs met by a lightweight, simply featured, inexpensive portable, it's likely to impel all of the major players in the industry to pile on by lowering their prices.

This, of course, is precisely what open source has done to proprietary code, so it's interesting to see the same happening to hardware, again driven by free software.

The Council of the EU is Barking

Want some amusement? Try this, which comes from the Council of the EU:

In order to succeed in the transition to a highly competitive knowledge economy, the European Union needs to create a "fifth freedom" - the free movement of knowledge. Member States and the Commission are invited to deepen their dialogue and expand their cooperation in order to further identify and remove obstacles to the cross-border mobility of knowledge.

Now, the easiest and most obvious way of removing "obstacles to the cross-border mobility of knowledge" would, of course, be to mandate open access.

Of which there is no mention whatsoever in said communication. (Via Open Access News.)

Broadcast Treaty Threatened Again

This idea died at WIPO, and should now be laid to rest with the canonical stake through its heart:

in view of a standstill in WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) negotiations on a convention on neighbouring rights of broadcasting organisations, the Committee of Ministers has asked the Council of Europe body entrusted with developing standards on freedom of expression, media and new communication services - the Steering Committee on the Media and New Communication Services (CDMC) - to take stock of the situation and, if justified, to elaborate a draft Council of Europe convention designed to reinforce the protection of those rights (near copyright of broadcast signals). Such a convention would add to existing Council of Europe instruments on this and related subjects, which include a number of recommendations and declarations as well as a 1994 convention relating to questions on copyright law and neighbouring rights in the framework of transfrontier broadcasting by satellite and the 2001 convention on the legal protection of services based on, or consisting of, conditional access.

(Via IP Justice.)

Open Enterprise Interview: Ivo Jansch

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Chumby Era Begins

Today is a Chumbylicious day:

Chumby Industries announced today the public launch of the chumby, its much-anticipated compact consumer Internet device that enables people to receive a constant personalized broadcast of their favorite parts of the Web. The chumby device is currently available in the U.S. at www.chumby.com for $179.95 including shipping.

A little bigger than a coffee cup, the Wi-Fi connected chumby provides people with a fun, hassle-free way to enjoy what they want most out of the Internet at a glance and wake up to thousands of different streaming Internet radio stations, custom "alarm tones," videos and more. With a large and growing base of content from the Internet, including the latest news, weather and entertainment, as well as the ability to share photos, widgets and e-cards with family and friends, the chumby is one of the most versatile and lifestyle-friendly Internet enabled devices on the market today.

One reason why it is so versatile is that it runs GNU/Linux and is designed to be hacked. Here's what Linux Journal had to say on the subject:

“Chumby Industries was formed by hackers who wanted to create something interesting, useful and different. The starting point was the humble clock radio”, its creators explain. Since then, Chumby has evolved from a clock in a cushion to an Any-purpose Net-native Linux device. That's any with a capital A, because the Chumby is built to be hackable at every level, including the physical. Not only does it sense motions and squeezings, but it also hosts an assortment of charms, through its “outerware API”. The charms and much more about the Chumby were designed by Susan Kare (who designed the original desktop icons for the Macintosh and Windows, among too many other things to mention). Susan is Creative Director for Chumby. The company might be cuddly, but it means business too.

And if that's not enough, one of the founders of Chumby is Bunnie Huang, ace hardware hacker. I'm sure that the Chumby will not only be hugely successful, but will spawn an entire industry of configurable consumer widgets.

The only blemish is that you can't currently buy the Chumby outside the US.....

All A-Twitter About Open Source

Here's a clever idea. For those - like myself - who don't Twitter, but want to keep up with the Twittersphere, Raven Zachary has put together a consolidated feed of some of the main open source Twitterers:

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

I particularly like the fact that I can subscribe to an RSS feed, which justs adds to flow of info that sloshes down every few minutes.

OOXML: "Insufficient and Unnecessary"

Google is pretty careful not to poke the Redmond behemoth too publicly, but apparently it couldn't resist over the upcoming OOXML vote:

Currently, the technology industry is evaluating a proposed ISO standard for document formats. Given the importance of a workable standard, Microsoft's submission of Office Open XML (OOXML ) as an additional international standard has caught the attention of many. In September 2007, the original request to ISO was defeated. After further technical analysis of the specification along with all the additional data available on OOXML, Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.

Still Not Learning from Past Experience

The intellectual monopolies lord giveth, and the intellectual monopolies lord taketh away:

Blackboard has prevailed in an e-learning patent dispute against Desire2Learn. A federal jury in Lufkin, TX made the determination Friday afternoon, following a two-week trial. Blackboard was seeking $17 million in lost revenue, as well as an injunction against the company, which is based in Canada.

As you may recall, Blackboard is claiming a ridiculous broad patent on a wide range of obvious ideas:

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

(Via Techdirt.)

An Open Marriage Made in Heaven?

Maybe Microsoft and Yahoo *are* made for each other. After all, both seem to have got the hots for openness - first Microsoft, and now Yahoo:

"Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers," said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo! Network Division. "In addition, we recently announced that we will be opening up our user interface for Yahoo! Search, as well as creating a smarter inbox by opening up Yahoo! Mail, two other key ways that consumers start with Yahoo!."

Unfortunately, I'm with Hamlet on this one: words, words, words. (Via Mashable.)

Patents to Stifle Competition? - Surely Not

Another judge gets it:

A federal judge recently got so infuriated by the conduct of two highly regarded trial attorneys that he overturned a jury's $51 million verdict, then ordered the lawyers to pay the fees and costs of the opposing lawyers, a sum that could total several million dollars.

U.S. District Senior Judge Richard P. Matsch sanctioned attorneys Terrance McMahon and Vera Elson of the firm McDermott, Will and Emery, of Chicago and San Francisco, for "cavalier and abusive" misconduct and for having a "what can I get away with?" attitude during a 13-day patent infringement trial in Denver.

He ruled that the entire trial was "frivolous" and the case filed solely to stifle competition rather than to protect a patent.

(Via Slashdot.)

Get a Life? - Get a Clue

I came across the following at the weekend:

Speaking at a Microsoft-hosted event, analyst David Mitchell revealed he used to lecture police on riot control, before eventually becoming the senior vice president of IT research at Ovum. "I thought I would never come back to talking about riot control until I got into the Open XML debate," he claimed.

Mitchell said that people involved in riots fell into two camps: "decent orderly protestors and nutters", and claims that both are participating in the OOXML process. "There are a number of comments that are decent technical debate," he said. "There's also a fair amount of radical activists who are protesting just to cause disruption."

"I feel like getting hold of people and saying 'get a life'," he adds. "It's only a document format. It's just got too silly."

Only a document format?!? How can someone who's supposed to be an analyst be unaware of the larger issues? Document formats are the offline equivalent of HTML, and openness is just as critical off as on the Web. To say that "it's only a document format" misses the point entirely.

Having boiled up a nice vat of invective, I was going to lay into this wrong-headed thinking at some length, when I came across this post by Andy Updegrove, which is not only one of his best, but I would venture that it is also one of his most important. It says more less exactly what I was going to say, only rather better:

It should not go unmentioned that the stakes for society are even higher than I have thus far suggested, because the questions raised above extend beyond the field of ITC [information technology and communications]. Standards of equal importance are urgently needed in other areas as well. These will have as profound an impact on commerce and the human condition in areas such as global warming, and will tell us what we can and cannot do except at our peril, how we will determine whether we are winning or losing that battle, and how we can police ourselves from subjecting ourselves to further environmental degradation.

So it is we see that what happens in Geneva this week is about far more than whether Microsoft wins and IBM and its allies lose or vis-versa, even if that will be the superficial result. It is about fundamental human rights, about not only seizing but also securing the opportunities of the future for the benefit of all. Only by thinking clearly and deeply about these larger issues will we be able to adapt the practices of the past to meet the challenges of a future that has already arrived, whether we realize it or not.

Adobe Opens Up (A Bit)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Madness: ATMs Running Windows XP?

How stupid can banks get?

A white paper by security services company Network Box has said ATM's are less secure because of changes to the way they operate. It said that 70 per cent of current ATMs are essentially PCs running PC operating systems like Windows XP. This makes them more susceptible than when ATMs were mainly built with proprietary software and communication protocols.

...

"If [the banks] have got Windows XP-based ATM's then this is obviously something which is a concern. We don't want our details sent in plain text. The current firewall protection is not sufficient and they need to look seriously in how to rectify this so there isn't a breach," said Heron.

So *that's* why the collective noun for bankers is a wunch.