Open Media Now

OMNow is a foundation dedicated to the development, support and empowerment of an open media infrastructure. Upon this infrastructure stand companies and individuals who need free media solutions. Free media solutions save companies money and give them control over product technology. Such solutions support individuals by offering them legal ways to create, distribute and display their creative works. Our foundation opens the media market by actively developing operating system-agnostic and cross-platform solutions.

Pity they're starting with bloody Flash/Gnash....

The US Fashion Industry's Death-Wish

Another great post from Mike Masnic:

The fashion industry got jealous of the entertainment industry's ability to crack down on innovation with copyrights and pushed Congress to introduce new legislation that would add a copyright for fashion design. Recently such laws have been getting a big push from politicians who are pandering to the fashion industry. Of course, studies have shown that the very reason the industry has thrived was because the lack of IP protection. In fact, one bit of research showed that adding IP protections to fashion could kill the industry.

Meet the New Governor: Open Source

Everyone knows that government is dull - dull, but very, very important. So a couple of recent moves in this dull but important world seem pretty significant to me.

First, there's this:

European public administrations that want to use software that is offered for free, such as Open Source software, do not need to organise a call for tender.

This is the conclusion of the Dutch government project NOIV, after studying European rules on tenders. The NOIV published an English translation of its guide for ICT buyers in the public and semi-public sectors, 'The acquisition of (open-source) software', on its website this week.

What that might mean is that it will be much easier to take the open source route than the proprietary one, since government departments (in Holland, at least) will be able to avoid all the hassle of putting out tenders and then sifting through them, and so more departments will take opt for it.

Then there's this:

The French-speaking Brussels Parliament (PFB) is considering to increase its use of Open Source, said Joël Tournemenne, director of the parliament's IT department, without giving more details.

Tournemenne visited the Solutions Linux conference in Paris at the end of January, where he spoke with the developers of Tabellio, an Open Source projects funded by the PFB.

Tabellio should result in an Open Source suite of applications for drafting, managing and publishing legislative documents and is meant for parliaments and assemblies. The project is a joined effort of two Belgian regional parliaments: the PFB and the Parliament of the French Community in Belgium.

What interests me here is not so much the details, but the fact that something like the open source Tabellio even exists: free software for "drafting, managing and publishing legislative documents" that "is meant for parliaments and assemblies"? You can hardly get closer to the heart of government - and hence power - than that.

Your Private Second Life

It's been an open secret for some time that IBM has been creating intranet-based virtual worlds, but this seems to be the first official news about it:

IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

...

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

You Know Open Source Has Really Arrived...

...when the two main political parties in the UK are squabbling over who is truer to the open source spirit:

David Cameron embraced Linux, open source and bottoms-up decision-making today as he detailed his vision of a Tory innovation policy in a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Cameron pledged that a Tory government would set the UK’s data free – but not in a bad way, like HMRC. Rather, he said, he wanted to ensure people could access information which allowed them to create “innovative applications that serve the public benefit”. This “information liberation” meant ensuring spending data was transparent for example, and that people could easily compare crime figures.

At the same time, he said, “We also want to see how open source methods can help overcome the massive problems in government IT programs”. Cameron said the Tories would reject Labour’s addiction to the mainframe model. Instead, he claimed, a Conservative government would follow private sector best practice and introduce open standards, “that enables IT contracts to be split up into modular components”.

...


Cameron’s pledge to open source comes just days after the minister for transformational government, Tom Watson, claimed that Labour is the party that really, you know, gets open source.

In his speech on Monday announcing the government’s Power of Information taskforce, he referred to an earlier speech where “I talked about the three rules of open source - one, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it." He then recounted how the Tories immediately sent out an email “laying claim that in fact they are the ‘owners’ of these new ideas. I was accused of plundering policies from the Conservatives.”

Fight, fight, fight.

Happy Birthday, Open Data

The received wisdom is that open source begat open access, which begat open data, and in broad outline that's true enough. But in one respect it's quite wrong: the first, and arguably most important open data store was set up fully 25 years ago, and is still going from strength to strength:

For a quarter century, GenBank has helped advance scientific discovery worldwide. The nucleic acid sequence database was established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1982. Since its creation, the GenBank database has grown at an exponential rate. Amazing as it may seem, in 1984, the entirety of GenBank’s data was published in a two volume hardcover book. Today, if the current contents of GenBank’s database were printed, it would fill more than 300 pickup trucks with paper.

Unveiled at the onset of the “Information Age”, GenBank has continued to evolve and incorporate technological innovations. The GenBank database has remained on the cutting edge of technology and illustrates the dynamic changes over the past 25 years in quantity and speed with which information is shared.

GenBank joined with sequence databases in Europe and Japan to form the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. GenBank was one of the earliest bioinformatics community projects on the Internet promoting open access communications among bioscientists. In 1992, the GenBank project transitioned to the newly created National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) within NIH where it resides today.

Open Enterprise Interview: Jeff Haynie

On Open Enterprise blog.

Cracking a Hard(ware) Problem

It is a sad but true fact that hardware issues - whether or not a particular bit of kit is supported - still dog GNU/Linux, and remain a major obstacle to its wider use. Happily, a partial solution is available from the community of current users, who collectively have scads of info about what works and what doesn't. Now there's a site that seeks to bring it all together, UbuntuHCL.org:

Our mission is to provide a forum for Ubuntu users to share their experiences with different hardware, to ease the transition of new users to Ubuntu, as well as help users pick the right hardware for their Linux system.

The Russian Experiment

I've always thought that Russia offered very fertile ground for free software. It has some of the best hackers in the worlds (not to mention crackers), a need for customised software (not least because it will be in Cyrillic) and not much dosh to pay for exorbitant licensing fees. So news that Russia was aiming to move schoolchildren to free software seemed promising, even if the cynic in me wondered whether anything would actually come of it.

Well, here's a useful update on what exactly is happening with the project:

First of all, first deliverables have already become available. Openly and publicly (Russian). Among others, you are able to download the specially tailored Linux distributions, including a version tailored for older PCs with 128-256 MB of RAM and P-233-class CPUs and a Terminal Server edition that allows to use older PCs as thin terminals provided a decent server is available in the classroom.Secondly, the information is now coming from more than one source, which indicates that the regional participants of the project have both freedom and willingness to act (Perm, Tomsk, Moscow, all in Russian). The most curious is the website of the Perm region, where a map of the integration progress is available. The numbers in black correspond to the total amount of schools (first number is for city/town schools, second is for rural schools), the numbers in red correspond to the schools where Free Software is already being used.

Attack of the Copyright Were-Rabbit

There is a counter-reformation movement afoot in the world of copyright. The purpose of the movement is to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity, rather than, as is currently the case, merely to give lip service to those concepts as the scope of copyright is expanded to were-rabbit size.

Another great post from William Patry, one of Google's better hires.

British Library = National Disgrace

I've noted before that there's something rotten at the heart of the British Library, which insists on locking down knowledge in Microsoft's proprietary formats. Now NoOOXML starts to pull all the threads together:

the company Griffin Brown, of which the BRM convenor Alex Brown is the director, sent out a press release 13 March 08 celebrating the 10th anniversary of XML:

Recent moves by Microsoft to standardise its Office products around XML file formats merely confirms that most valuable business data in the future will be stored in XML. … Alex Brown is convenor of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Ballot Resolution Process, and has recently been elected to the panel to advise the British Library on how to handle digital submission of journal articles.

What's the betting those digital submissions end up in OOXML?
(Via Boycott Novell.)

Signs of the (Digital) Times

Readers of this blog will know that I am fascinated by the analogue/digital divide, and how the passage from one to the other causes all sorts of interesting problems:

Question: Why is eBay requiring sellers of digitally downloaded goods to list their items in the Classified Ads format?

Answer: Most items that require digital delivery, once created, can be very easily replicated. This ease of replication creates the opportunity for sellers to list thousands of the same item in an attempt to manipulate the Feedback system. It also creates a perception that even legitimate sellers of Digital Goods are manipulating the Feedback system. This dynamic -- real and perceived -- undermines trust across the entire marketplace.

We understand that digital goods, by themselves, are not the cause of Feedback Manipulation, but clarity of policy and ease of enforcement require all digitally downloaded items to be offered via the Classified Ads format.

Tricky stuff this business in the absence of scarcity.... (Via Techdirt.)

UK Copyright: Winners and Losers

I often spout about copyight in this blog, but I enjoy the luxury of ignorance. If you want a really balanced account of the situation in the UK, try this excellent talk given by Ray Corrigan recently:

My brief for this morning is to look at current UK copyright legislation – how it compares internationally, and who are the winners and losers. I will be starting with a whistle-stop tour of UK copyright law in historical context, before looking at international comparisons and then focusing on the winners and losers.

Who could ask for more? Well, apart from a more reasonable copyright regime, of course.

Cheeky Bulgars

How dare they?

The Bulgarian government organised a meeting with Open Source companies and developers on 21 March in Sofia. Nikolay Vassilev, the minister for State Administration, told the representatives of software companies, IT services companies and Open Source developers that the government is about to review the state's IT system and that it wants to get a better understanding of Open Source software. The minister admitted he had once worked with Apple Macintosh, but had in the last thirteen years only experienced Microsoft applications. He told the Open Source advocates he would listen to their views on IT: "We have an open mind and will accept reasonable propositions."

Uighur Splittists?

Where will it all end?

Like Tibetans in Tibet, Uighurs have historically been the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, indigenous groups have chafed at the arrival of large numbers Han Chinese, the country’s predominant ethnic groups, who have migrated to western regions with strong government support.

Uighurs, like Tibetans, have complained that recent Han arrivals now dominate their local economies, even as the Han-run local governments insert themselves deeper into schools and religious practices to weed out cultural practices that officials fear might reinforce a separate ethnic or religious identity. In telephone interviews, Han residents of Khotan and nearby areas said there was a long history of distrust and tension between Han and Uighur communities. Some Han migrants insisted the atmosphere remained volatile, and said that the Uighurs had been inspired by the recent Tibetan unrest.

Since you ask, the Uighurs actually speak a Turkic language, which means that they have even less to do with the Chinese than the Tibetans, who at least once probably spoke the same language (a few thousands years ago, that is).

Why the Post Office Thinks It's 1998

You may find it hard to believe the Post Office is closing down vast numbers of its local branches that everyone wants to use, but I think I've discovered the reason why: it is so out of touch it doesn't even know what the date is.

It seems to think it's 1998 - you know, those far-off, fabled times, when people wrote Web sites that only worked with Internet Explorer. Like this one, say, which gives the following helpful message when you view it with Firefox:

This website is best viewed on Internet Explorer version 5.3 or above

Watch out, little Post Office, I've heard a terrible rumour that the 21st century is hurtling towards you....

Whatever Happened to Standards?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux: Too Much of a Good Thing?

The transformation of the Linux Foundation from a rather sleepy, peripheral player into one of the main voices for open source has been fascinating to watch. It's certainly welcome, too, because one of the problems of Linux in particular, and open source in general, is that the distributed production has tended to lead to dissipation in terms of getting the message across.

Now, in addition to a useful series of interviews with open source luminaires, the Linux Foundation is getting into surveys:

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is publishing a new report written by kernel developers Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, and LF Director of Marketing Amanda McPherson.

The report titled “Linux Kernel Development: How Fast is it Going, Who is doing it and Who is Sponsoring it?” is available today. The paper finds that over the last three years the number of developers contributing to the kernel has tripled and that there has been a significant increase in the number of companies supporting kernel development.

Even though Linux has achieved near-ubiquity as a technology platform powering Internet applications, corporate servers, embedded and mobile devices and desktops, mainstream users know very little about how Linux is actually developed. This community paper exposes those dynamics and describes a large and distributed developer and corporate community that supports the expansion and innovation of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies who are fierce competitors in other areas.

Among its findings:

o Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers working for more than 100 different corporations. This is the foundation for the largest distributed software development project in the world.

o Since 2005, the number of active kernel developers has tripled, reflecting the growing importance of Linux in the embedded systems, server, and desktop markets.

o Between 70 and 95 percent of those developers are being paid for their work, dispelling the “hobbyist” myth present from the start of open source development.

...

o More than 70 percent of total contributions to the kernel come from developers working at a range of companies including IBM, Intel, The Linux Foundation, MIPS Technology, MontaVista, Movial, NetApp, Novell and Red Hat. These companies, and many others, find that by improving the kernel they have a competitive edge in their markets.

But one result seems slightly worrying to me:

o An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day, and a new kernel is released approximately every 2.7 months.

o The kernel, since 2005, has been growing at a steady state of 10 percent per year.

Surely that means that Linux is steadily becoming more and more bloated? I've always been of the view that one of Linux's great virtues is leanness, especially compared to a Certain Other operating system. While change can be good, I don't think that more is necessarily is better when it comes to lines of code. Perhaps the Linux Foundation's next project could be to study how much of the kernel could be trimmed away to return it to its earlier, svelte self.

OK, So Adobe Supports GNU/Linux – But How Much?

On Open Enterprise blog.

You Must Be Joking

They can't be serious:

This is a proposal for an integrated National Operational Deterrence and Intelligence Surveillance System (NODISS) strategy to be accomplished over a five to fifteen year period concurrent with the introduction of compulsory Identity Cards and the Tracking Database (“audit trail”) of the National Identity Register. It has been prepared by the Domestic Affairs Cabinet Committee Officials Committee, chaired by the Cabinet Office.

What a scoop - that Arsene Ghia has really got her, er...oh, never mind.

In Praise of Journalistic Scum

On Open Enterprise blog.

oCERT – A Dead Cert for Security

On Open Enterprise blog.

Teaching Blackboard a Lesson About Patents

On Open Enterprise blog.

Now the Fun Begins

Sad - but just the end of the beginning....

The Mighty Atom

Here's another reason why ultraportables are going to take off.