Hyperactive Hyperic

On Open Enterprise blog.

EU: Ewww on Patented Software Standards

Digital Majority News points us to a fine hidalgo asking a key question about the EU's policy on software standards:

The 'European ICT crossroads: A new direction for global success' conference organised by the Commission's DG Enterprise and Industry on 12 February 2008 could turn out to have been a decisive moment for communications and information in the EU. The idea contained in the conference's title, at least, should be a turning point. It also embodies the very essence of what could be seen as the ideal framework for a wideranging and open discussion – without pre-formed ideas – on defining a European strategy on communications, in the search for tools and systems, with a major potential for the future, that are and within the grasp of a greater number of citizens. However, a quick assessment of the discussion document reveals certain worrying features, indicative of a certain tendency towards standardisation by means of patents, which in practice involve the exclusion of free software which is available free of charge. The document clearly supports the (F)RAND option with regard to managing intellectual property rights, which in practice implies not only that a choice has been made beforehand, but furthermore that this choice favours a system which benefits, and is in the hands of, the large software developing companies, rather than users.

Indicative of this is the fact that the original Spanish question is only available in English as a Microsoft Word document....

First Dirac Video Codec May or May Not Be Available

The BBC's Dirac is:

a general-purpose video compression family suitable for everything from internet streaming to HDTV and electronic cinema.

and

a very versatile video compression family. It includes a range of tools which gives flexibility in performance to match the environment.

Appropriately enough, "the world's first high performance implementation of Dirac" has been made by none other than the Schrödinger project:

The final specification of Dirac became available on 21st of January 2008 and now the Schrödinger project is proud to announce an implementation of that specification. Schrödinger core is implemented in ANSI C with further assembly level optimisations privided through the liboil optimisation library. The Schrödinger decoding and encoding components offer a stable ABI for developers which will enable easy integration of Dirac support for application and media framework developers. The Schrödinger project also includes a set of GStreamer plugins as an example of how to use the Schrödinger library in a modern multimedia framework.

The release of the Schrodinger library will significantly reduce the the time required to include Dirac support in multimedia applications, therefore reducing the barrier to adoption substantially.

Probably.

Windows 7: Out of Luck

Microsoft to date has said little about Windows 7, which had been in development under the code name Blackcomb. It's generally believed that the OS will ship in the 2010 timeframe.

That's one year after the federal government's oversight of Microsoft is now slated to expire. As a result, the Technical Committee is trying to get its hands on as much Windows 7 code as it can as soon as possible. "The TC has begun to review Windows 7 itself. Microsoft recently supplied the TC with a build of Windows 7, and is discussing TC testing going forward," the report stated.

Luckily for us, the EU's interest has no cut-off date....

Open Letter to America

Since some of America's top minds are apparently having a bit of bother deciding this one, I thought the following personal experiences might help. (Via Craig Murray.)

Update: Not that we can talk, of course.

Canonical's GNU Bazaar

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Enterprises Should Fight Software Patents

On Open Enterprise blog.

What Microsoft Groks Not

The other Microsoft Bill on open-sourcing Windows:

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy.

Microsoft general manager Bill Hilf has said the Windows source code is "irrelevant for what people want".

But what you seem not to understand, Bill, is that opening up helps *you* make Windows better, which is hardly "irrelevant for what people want."

Of Book Bankruptcy

Here's a poignant post about realising that book you have cradled within you for the last years not only will never get written, but doesn't need writing (BTDTGTTS). It concludes:

And to you reading this, keep up the good fight for open, secure and private computing, but remember the words of George Eliot, which still adorn my old domain's home page:

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

When I do have something to say that relates to this blog's past themes, I will say it here, at least for now. I'm definitely a wiser man for all I've tried to achieve, but now I need to get back to work.

Another Reason Why "Three Strikes" Won't Work

The idea that a Draconian "three strikes and you're out" approach will actually stop people from downloading copyrighted material betrays a vast ignorance of how the Internet works, and of the fact that some people thrive on a challenge. Here's one way of spiking the "three strikes" approach:

BTGuard is an easy to use proxy service that adds an extra layer of privacy to your BitTorrent transfers. The service is designed for BitTorrent users who don’t want their ISPs or any third party to log or throttle their IPs or traffic.

btguardBTGuard reroutes all your BitTorrent traffic through their servers in Canada. This means that anyone who connects to you via BitTorrent, even the MPAA or RIAA, will see BTGuard’s IP, and not yours.

BTGuard does not have any bandwidth or volume restrictions, and while we briefly tested the service (from Europe), the speeds were almost equal to an unsecured connection. Setting it up is fairly easy, the only thing you need to do is enter the username and password provided by BTGuard, and you’re ready to go.

TorrentFreak asked one of the founders of the project why they launched the service, he told us: “More and more, people find their privacy being invaded on the Internet and we find it to be a very disturbing, unethical trend. There are some countries that still actively protect privacy, one of which is Canada.”

So the RIAA will end up in Canada, where the trail goes cold. Then what?

Vista's Geek Tragedy

Nice framing of the train-wreck that is Microsoft Vista by Randall Stross in the NYT:

Act 1: In 2005, Microsoft plans to say that only PCs that are properly equipped to handle the heavy graphics demands of Vista are “Vista Ready.”

Act 2: In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end machines while Vista is readied. (A customer could reasonably conclude that Microsoft is saying, Buy Now, Upgrade Later.) A semantic adjustment is made: Instead of saying that a PC is “Vista Ready,” which might convey the idea that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as “Vista Capable,” which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work.

The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that “even a piece of junk will qualify,” Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, “It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.”

Act 3: In 2007, Vista is released in multiple versions, including “Home Basic,” which lacks Vista’s distinctive graphics. This placed Microsoft’s partners in an embarrassing position. Dell, which gave Microsoft a postmortem report that was also included among court documents, dryly remarked: “Customers did not understand what ‘Capable’ meant and expected more than could/would be delivered.”

The World's Leading Anti-Scientific Society

Science is a pradigmatically open endeavour. It proceeds by sharing knowledge freely, allowing others to build on your work. If any domain should display openness in depth, it is science. That seems to have escaped the notice of the American Chemical Society, which pompously declares itself "the world's leading scientific society", as Peter Murray-Rust explains:

CAS identifiers have come to be accepted as a primary identifier system for chemistry - thus caffeine has the CAS number [58-08-2]. This is the only number I can reliably get from CAS without paying (or having my institution or country pay). The number is semantically almost void - it cannot be worked out like an InChI. InChI and CAS serve different purposes - CAS can be related to any substance including mixtures of molecules such as kerosene - InChI is algorithmically derived from the molecular structure and does not apply to mixtures. CAS numbers are frequently used to assert what a substance is and to indicate whether two substances are the same or different. They are commonly used in supplier catalogues and on bottles.

CAS numbers are copyright CAS/ACS who have the legal right to regulate their use - as above. They would make excellent identifiers for the semantic web, except that they are closed. If I want to find out what [67-64-1] is I can only do this by paying CAS - about 6 USD for each lookup (e.g. on STN Easy). This immediately rules it out for any semantic web application which assumes that resolving links is free. Wikpedia tells me that this number corresponds to acetone (nail varnish remover) but they now do not have the freedom to do this. Similarly Pubchem do not use CAS numbers as they have no right to do so. (Anumber of suppliers and other sources quote CAS numbers, many without explicit permission).

An identifier system for chemistry is extremely valuable (patents, safety, etc.) but can cause great problems when mistakes are made. If compounds are misordered because of mistakes in identifiers serious accidents could occur. An open system of identifiers would be highly valuable in developing the chemical semantic web and increasing quality. The closed and restrictive practices of CAS make it more difficult to create Web 2.0 applications in chemistry.

I do not believe this situation can last. Closed systems on the web cannot survive for many more years unless rigorously enforced by restrictive legal and business processes. The heads of chemistry departments who currently have no concern for informatics in the C21 will retire and a new generation of less conservative chemists will increasingly sweep away the Closed approach. Technology such as robots acting on semantic publications will make human-collected abstracts obsolete.

Fortunately, Peter points out that there is a solution:

The use of CAS numbers has been abandoned by organisations such as PubChem for exactly this reason. PubChem now has nearly 20 million substances. It holds records for all compounds that are likely to occur on MSDS. It’s highly respected (although ACS lobbied the US government to limit Pubchem’s activities). It is part of the NIH and now - with the NIH mandate - effectively safe from the ACS. It provides a credible alternative.

We (including Wikipedia) should now switch from using CAS numbers to using PubChem IDs wherever possible. It won’t be a simple transition - certainly we shan’t find 100% overlap. But it will solve all the common substances and therefore 90%+ use of CAS numbers.

We shall need software. We and others are now developing the next generation of chemical informatics software using RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF allows the description of ambiguities and ontologies. This will allow chemical information to be gleaned directly from authoritative sources using robots. (Of course some of the authorities are currently conservative and do not allow access to their material because of restrictive copyright and licences, but that is starting to change, even in chemistry). As information becomes more open, the CAS system will be increasingly isolated in a world of chemical commerce.

Clearly, it's time to kill off this pernicious closed CAS system, which is damaging science, by boycotting it entirely. And while we're at it, I suggest we might as well get rid of the world's leading *anti*-scientific society too. (Via Open Access News.)

Update: There seems to be some movement as far as using CAS numbers on Wikipedia, but I can't tell whether that's just a one-off, highly limited solution, or part of a larger move to make ACS knowledge freely available to all such open projects. We shall see.

WSJ on OA

The message is spreading within the citadel:

Other than in the realm of life-saving medicine, why should any of this matter to nonacademics? Well, for one thing, barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can't reproduce in isolation. It's easy to scoff at the rise of Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but a flood of truly important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that produces this work is surely one of America's greatest competitive advantages.

In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money. Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social sciences to write in plain English.

Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world's poor; indeed, opening up the research produced on America's campuses via the Internet is probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped countries rise from poverty. Closer to home, open access to scholarly work via the Internet would help counteract the plague of plagiarism that the Internet itself has abetted. Anyone suspecting a scholar of such chicanery could search for a phrase or two in Google and see if somebody else's work turns up with the same unusual text string.

Mad About MIDI

MIDI files are a real throwback to an earlier era, when passing around Mbytes of data was not an option. Sleek MIDI files - typically a few tens of kilobytes - were perfect, even if the sound quality left something to be desired.

I thought that MIDI had pretty much disappeared, but on the contrary, it seems to be thriving. Take Kunst der Fuge, which has a huge collection of classical music, although not all of it freely available.

And it's not just the obvious stuff. Here, for example is pretty everything that the insane but amazing French composer Charles Valentin Alkan wrote. Since much of it is almost unplayable by mere mortals, MIDI files are probably a good way to hear the stuff. (Via Creative Commons.)

Microsoft Slouches Towards Bethlehem

On Open Enterprise blog.

Dopplr Doubles Up

They say that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. That's certainly true in terms of the carbon footprint of air travel. If you're not aware of how much you're producing, how can you set about minimisiing it sensibly?

Now you can, thanks to Dopplr:

On Thursday at ETech, Gavin Starks announced that Dopplr is teaming up with AMEE to help you measure your travel carbon footprint.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on this feature, but we’re previewing it with alpha-testers this week and it’ll be launching soon. Measurement is just the first step along this road, and we’ll be working with AMEE to make sure you have pointers to the information you need to understand and act on this data.

This is a great example of how the very latest in Web 2.0 approaches can make a difference to the real world too.

ID Cards Are the Ultimate Identity Theft

This piece by Ian Angell is the definitive rebuttal of the UK government's position on ID cards. It articulates all of my concerns, but puts it rather better than I could. Try this, for example:

Errors won't just happen by accident. It's possible to imagine that workers on the ID database will be corrupted, threatened or blackmailed into creating perfectly legal ID cards for international terrorists and criminals. Then the ID card, far from eliminating problems, will be a one-stop shop for identity fraud; foreign terrorists, illegal immigrants will be waived past all immigration checks.

That's the practical downside. But there's an even more profound philosophical one, too:

However, the ID card itself isn't the real problem: it's the ID register. There, each entry will eventually take on a legal status. In time, all other proofs of identity will refer back to the one entry. If the register is wrong - and remember fallible human hands will at some stage have to handle your personal information - then all other databases will be wrong too. Given the propensity of officialdom to trust the details on their computer screen, rather than the person in front of them, you will have to conform to your entry in the register - or become a non-person.

In effect, your identity won't reside in the living flesh and blood of you, but in the database. You will be separated from your identity; you will no longer own it. All your property and money will de facto belong to the database entry. You only have access to your property with the permission of the database. Paradoxically, you only agreed to register to protect yourself from “identity theft”, and instead you find yourself victim of the ultimate identity theft - the total loss of control over your identity.

Anybody who reads this and still wants ID cards is either a complete fool or a thoroughgoing knave. (Via Blogzilla.)

Enter the (Komodo) Dragon

On Open Enterprise blog.

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.