Open Parliament

It's obviously petition season. Here's another one, Europe-wide in scope, calling for an "open European Parliament":

Citizens and stakeholder groups should not have to use the software of a single company in order to communicate with their elected officials or participate in the legislative process.

All companies should be given the chance to compete freely for contracts to supply ICT services to the European Parliament.

I am a citizen of the EU, and I want the European Parliament to adopt the use of open standards and to promote interoperability in the ICT sector.

We believe that the current situation, where the European Parliament’s ICT runs on proprietary software that is not interoperable with that of other vendors, where therefore citizens and stakeholder groups wishing to participate in the legislative process are forced to use the products of a single company, is in conflict with the first article of Chapter 1 in the Treaty of the European Union. An example of this is the live Web streaming from the European Parliament's plenary sessions – aimed at improving communication with citizens and insight into democratic processes – which will only work with Windows Media Player.

Sounds good to me. Just one thing: there's only 163 names at the moment, which isn't very impressive: why don't you join in?

Why Falling Flash Prices Threaten Microsoft

In the Guardian.

Monsanto Frightened of Openness

When a company is unwilling to stand in the bright illuminating light of openness, you know it's trying to keep something in the shadows:

Since 1901, Monsanto has brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, Terminator seeds and recombined milk, among other infamous products. But it's currently obsessed with the milk, or, more importantly, the milk labels, particularly those that read "rBST-free" or "rBGH-free." It's not the "BST" or "BGH" that bothers them so much; after all, bovine somatrophin, also known as bovine growth hormone, isn't exactly what the company is known for. Which is to say, it's naturally occurring. No, the problem is the "r" denoting "recombined." There's nothing natural about it. In fact, the science is increasingly pointing to the possibility that recombined milk is -- surprise! -- not as good for you as the real thing.

"Consumption of dairy products from cows treated with rbGH raise a number of health issues," explained Michael Hansen, a senior scientist for Consumers Union. "That includes increased antibiotic resistance, due to use of antibiotics to treat mastitis and other health problems, as well as increased levels of IGF-1, which has been linked to a range of cancers."

What's the Collective Noun for Ultraportables?

Whatever it is, here's a a bunch of them from CeBIT, mostly running GNU/Linux.

Second Life Viewer for GNU/Linux Goes Beta

Now Linux users can enjoy the same capabilities as Windows and Mac users to explore, create and socialize!

The beta includes several features we’ve added in recent months, such as:

* 3D voice support
* Media playback - play back any in-world media supported by GStreamer
* Lots and lots of bug fixes, polish, and performance improvements

What's particularly interesting is the view in the comments attached to this post that the GNU/Linux is already more stable than that for Windows.

Wikileaks Wins

And so do we:

A Swiss bank quietly dropped its lawsuit against renegade Web site Wikileaks.org on Wednesday, days after a judge reversed his order to disable the site for posting confidential bank documents.

In court papers, Bank Julius Baer didn't give a reason for dropping the suit and reserved the right to refile it later. Bank lawyer William Briggs didn't return a telephone call seeking comment.

Taking down entire Web sites when just a few documents are at stake was a terrible precedent; Bank Julius Baer's decision to drop the lawsuit is also good because it shows that people are beginning to understand the power of the Web to look after its own.

Open Source Jahrbuch 2008

No good deed goes unpunished, they say.

A year ago, I wrote the following about the Open Source Jahrbuch series:

All-in-all, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best book on open source that has been published in the few years or so. Taken together, the whole series of Yearbooks form perhaps the most important collection of writings on open source and related areas to be found in any language.

As a result of those rash words, I was asked whether I'd like to contribute to this year's tome, which, as ever, is freely available as a download. If you want to practise your German, my 'umble effort is on page 299 (they obviously believe in saving the best for last....)

It begins thus:

Stallman's Golden Rule and the Digital Commons

In the wake of the high-profile successes of free software, the related movements of open access, open data, open content and the rest are starting to impinge on the public's consciousness. But when they do, they are generally seen as simple applications of the ideas behind free software – in other words, as imitations, albeit interesting ones. This misses the bigger picture: that, together, the combined results of their efforts form a vast and unprecedented digital commons of knowledge. The main obstacles to expanding that commons yet further are now legal, rather than technical. They are the result of political lobbying by content industries that have failed to adapt their thinking to a digital, rather than an analogue, world. The emerging viability of open source companies, which share their software freely with customers, points the way to new kinds of business models based on embracing rather than enclosing the commons.

The Copyright Emperor Has No Clothes

Tim Lee has a stonker of a post on Ars Technica drawing parallels between copyright today and property rights debates of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US. It's a hugely-enjoyable, thought-provoking piece.

He also offers some commentary on his own words:

Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads in some places that they aren't going to like. Our property rights system was not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn't to dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among themselves.

The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright system with ordinary individuals' sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters 200 years ago didn't think it was right that they be booted off land they cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel it's unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a couple of CDs' worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, the copyright debate is really hotting up as people start to question the outrageous claims and assumptions of the maximalists. The great thing is, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the copyright emperor has no clothes.

Getting the Facts About Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement is an emotive area, generating more by heat than light. Hard facts are hard to come by, which makes this mammoth report on the subject in the UK particularly valuable. It's full of good stuff, but for me the killer was page 209, which looked people's attitudes to copyright infringement.

Here are the numbers: 70% don't think that legal download sites have the range of materials that illegal ones do and 64% would pay for stuff if it were available. As for the "three strikes and you're out" idea, 70% said they would stop if they got an email from they're ISP - but practically the same number, 68%, thought it very unlikely that they'd get caught anyway, suggesting that things aren't quite as black and white as some would have us think. (Via TorrentFreak.)

Vyatta (Hearts) Its Community

On Open Enterprise blogs.

The Sheer Ordinariness of Craig Newmark

I've written before about the excellent writing of Mark Pesce. He's at it again with a piece entitled "That Business Conversation". Although there's nothing hugely new there, it's well worth reading. I particularly liked the following section:

At one of the first of those meetings I met a man who impressed me by his sheer ordinariness. He was an accountant, and although he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of VR, he wasn’t working in the field – he was simply interested in it. Still, Craig Newmark was pleasant enough, and we’d always engage in a few lines of conversation at every meeting, although I can’t remember any of these conversations very distinctly.

Newmark met a lot of people – he was an excellent networker – and fairly quickly built up a nice list of email addresses for his contacts, whom he kept in contact with through a mailing list. This list, known as “Craig’s List”, because a de facto bulletin board for the core web and VR communities in San Francisco. People would share information about events in town, or observations, or – more frequently – they’d offer up something for sale, like a used car or a futon or an old telly.

As more people in San Francisco were sucked into the growing set of businesses which were making money from the Web, they too started reading Craig’s List, and started contributing to it. By the middle of 1995, there was too much content to be handled neatly in a mailing list, so Newmark – who, like nearly everyone else in the San Francisco Web community, had some basic web authoring skills – created a very simple web site which allowed people to post their own listings to the Web site. Newmark offered this service freely – his way of saying “thank you” to the community, and, equally important, his way of reinforcing all of the social relationships he’d built up in the last few years.

The rest, of course, is history.

Latin America Loves GNU/Linux

I was vaguely aware of the open source activity going on in Latin America, but I lacked the big picture. Matt Asay points to this feature, which provides a nice overview of the situation, country by country. It concludes:

In South American countries, as in most other areas of the world, the government is by far the biggest purchaser of software. Thus the Open Source trend that is now established in the government sector across the continent will doubtless spur Open Source adoption in the private sector.

There are a variety of motives for Open Source adoption in play in there, from the reduction in software costs to the desire to provide a "leg-up" to the local software industry. However, the motivation of the Peruvian government is unique in that the Peruvian supporters of the bill see "Open Source" as a citizen's right. The ownership and responsibility for the use of data and software have become a political issue in Peru.

This is an idea that is unlikely to go away.

A Privacy Disaster Waiting to Happen

I was already teetering on the brink of opting out of the NHS patient database; this just pushed me over:

A new national database of confidential patient records is being opened to access by NHS staff who need no professional qualifications - despite official assurances that records will only be accessed by specialists who are providing care or treatment.

A document obtained by Computer Weekly under the Freedom of Information Act also provides evidence that NHS Connecting for Health - which runs part of the £12.4bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT] - has quietly decided to weaken assurances given to patients about the confidentiality of records.

Doctors are angry because they say that patients were given an assurance that non-clinical staff would be unable to access the national summary care record database which is being trialled at NHS trusts in various parts of England.

Flash of Inspiration

One of the many flashes of insight that the Asus Eee PC has provided me with is that DVDs are dead. The Eee PC has no CD/DVD drive, but lets you plug in both USB drives and flash memory of suitably capacious volumes: who needs spinning bits of plastic when you can have totally poised transistors doing the work?

It seems someone else has had the same flash of inspiration:

AN IRISH OUTFIT, PortoMedia, is to open kiosks at which people can download the latest films straight onto a flash memory card in less than a minute.

The kiosks, in shopping centres or stations, will have up to 5,000 films available for rent or sale using a PIN number.

All punters need do in order to buy or rent a flick is to plug in their memory device, a key bought from the company resembling a standard USB, enter a PIN code, and then when they arrive home, connect the device into a dock attached to their TV and hey presto! Movie madness!

Galway-based PortoMedia reckons that a standard-definition film can be transferred to the card in 8 to 60 seconds, depending on the feature's length and the chip's speed.

Visible Body - Visibly Stupid

Here's a great idea:

Features:

*
Complete, fully interactive, 3D human anatomy model
*
Detailed models of all body systems
*
Dynamic search capability
*
Easy-to-use, 3D controls
*
Seamless compatibility with Internet Explorer

Scratch that "great idea," bit, here's a *stupid idea*: only Internet Explorer.... I thought this kind of suicidal shortsightedness went out in the 1990s. After all, who cares that Firefox has nearly 50% market share in some European countries?

The Rise and Rise of Mozilla

On Open Enterprise blog.

The (Intellectual Monopoly) Empire Fights Back

I've chronicled how WIPO is beginning to shift towards some semblance of fairness when it comes to intellectual monopolies. This is clearly bad news for those that have used WIPO to impose all kinds of unfair regimes on developing countries. It seems those forces of monopoly murkiness are fighting back - dirtily:

The World Customs Organisation is recommending far-reaching new rules on intellectual property rights that some say may extend beyond the organisation’s mandate.

Staff at the WCO’s Brussels headquarters are preparing what they describe as voluntary ‘model legislation’ to provide guidance on how IP rights can be upheld at border posts.

While they are hoping that the model will be approved by the 171-country body in June, representatives of developing countries were meeting this week to address concerns raised by Brazil over the proposal’s likely breadth.

Brazil is perturbed by a WCO recommendation that customs authorities need to be conferred with powers and be able to take measures that are additional to those set out in the key international accord on IP issues: the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS does not oblige its signatories to introduce border control measures relating to exports or goods in transit.

During discussions in February, Brazil argued that a WCO working group known as SECURE (Standards to be Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement) had no mandate to alter the international legal framework on intellectual property.

I'm sure they won't let a little detail like having "no mandate" get in the way....

Amazon the Bellwether

On Open Enterprise blog.

Really Googling the Genome

When I wrote a piece for the Guardian four years ago called "Googling the Genome", it was more of a metaphor than a specific warning about Google rummaging through your DNA. But it's a metaphor no more:

A Harvard University scientist backed by Google Inc. and OrbiMed Advisors LLC plans to unlock the secrets of common diseases by decoding the DNA of 100,000 people in the world's biggest gene sequencing project.

The *first* 100,000 people, I think they mean....

Japan Falls Back on the "Terrorist" Trope

Godwin's Law states:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

I'd like to propose Moody's Law as a variant:

"When governments can't come up with a real argument, they invoke terrorism."

And here we have it from the Japanese authorities:

Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen japanischen Walfängern und Tierschützern ist erneut eskaliert: Die Organisation Sea Shepherd hat ein Walfangschiff mit Buttersäure beworfen. Die Aktivisten sprechen von harmlosen Stinkbomben, Japans Regierung von einem Terrorangriff.

[The confrontation between the Japanese whalers and animal rights activists has escalated again: the Sea Shepherd Organisation has thrown Butyric Acid at a whaling ship. Activities speak of "harmless stinkbombs", the Japanese government of a "terror attack."]

What Planet Are They On?

First there were RSS feeds, but that soon became too messy. So people have bundled up similar feeds into planets - clever. Here's one of the latest: Planet Creative Commons

This page aggregates blogs from Creative Commons, CC jurisdiction projects, and the CC community.

If nothing else, it will give you a chance to practise your Slovenian.

Microsoft's Finances

Much of Microsoft's power - particularly the kind used in bluffing - flows from an unwritten assumption that it is a huge, vastly-profitable company, with almost limitless resources. The limitless resources bit will certainly change if it acquires Yahoo, since it has admitted that it will need to borrow something like $20 billion to finance that transaction. But there is increasing evidence that even without that gargantuan meal to pay for, Microsoft's financials are not as rosy as they seem.

One of the most assiduous followers of this angle is Roy Schestowitz. The only problem has been that his posts on the subject have been running for so long that there is something of a rat's nest of links to follow on on his site if you want to see the big picture.

Happily, he has just put together a consolidated piece that links to all the main pieces of the puzzle:

Here is a summary of about half of our posts which cover this area. To make them digestible (readable without having to follow the link), a summary of references (external) and key points are provided for each.

Worth keeping an eye on.

Bruce Schneier Knows Alice and Bob's Shared Secret

I want one, too.

Elonex One Sighted

So now there's a Web site with some details.

Also worth taking a look at is this BBC video. One thing I noticed was the little stand to prop the macine up: this doesn't surprise me, since it looks slightly top heavy with its big screen and thin keyboard.

It's obviously slightly underpowered compared to the Asus Eee PC, but may well be "good enough", especially for the education market. I hope it does well, not least because it's innovative.

Microsoft's New Meme: "Marketplace Relevance"

Well, you can probably guess what Microsoft's Jason Matusow writes in his post about the Geneva BRM from the headline:

The Open XML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) Was An Unqualified Success

That, of course, was to be expected. But what interests me is a new Microsoft meme that seems to hint at how they will try to play this going forward:

ISO/IEC standards are not only technically sound, but they should also be relevant to the marketplace.

* DIS 29500, as improved through the rigorous review of the past year and the decisions made by delegations during the BRM, is a specification that meets both bars of technical quality and marketplace relevance.
* Independent implementations of the specification are already available on most major operating systems platforms and in hundreds of applications. The statement that Open XML is about a single vendor is specious and empirically false.
* Open XML has brought more attention to, and interest in, international standardization than any specification in the history of the ICT industry. The reason for this is simple - greater openness in all document formats (not just Open XML) is a good thing for everyone. There is general recognition that there will be broad adoption of this format around the world. Open XML delivers on that promise and is part of the rich ecosystem of open document formats that are driving this issue forward.
* At the end of the day, customers should be able to choose the format(s) that best meet their needs and should not be told which technology to use. Open XML, as improved through the hard work of national bodies over the past year, is an attractive alternative for them.

This seems to be preparing the ground for an eventual rejection of OOXML. The line would be well, being an official ISO standard isn't *so* important: what matters is "marketplace relevance". And we all know what that means: just keep that status quo rolling...